Seriously, does anyone actually update, or do we all DISM/vLite integrate into our WIM and re-install every service pack anyways.
@ Hazar If you look for the Vista one you should find reports about people not being able to get into their OS and having to format. I would just rather stick with something thats proven to work since Vista then use something that was done in Vista and did get patched. History may have a funny way of repeating itself and I would rather not risk it and play cat and mouse.
For me this doesnt work at all, no matter what i try. Heres what i did: bootmgr is on the system reserved partion. No problem, simply gave it a letter. Opened the partition, tried to move the original bootmgr out of the root. Didnt work because the file was locked by another process. (Same for deleting/overwriting.) Used Unlocker to delete it. Put patched bootmgr on root and s/h/r'ed it. Installed provided cert and matching Acer key. Rebooted, not activated. The odd part: When i went to delete the Acer bootmgr it was not locked by a process! (Unlike the original one was.) It was deleted right away. Since it was odd that the original one was locked and the new one not i deleted it and rebooted to see if win was actually booting from this bootmgr file. System hung with a 'bootmgr not found' error. Booted DVD, restored the system, tried the whole thing again. Again the restored bootmgr was locked by another process. Used Unlocker to delete it, put patched one on root. Installed cert&key another time, just to be safe. Reboot, not activated. Again the patched bootmgr could be deleted fine as it was not locked by another process. Conclusion: No idea whats going on, it just doesnt seem to function.
@Phazor, Can you identify the process that is locking it? Nothing should be accessing it once its part in bootstrapping the OS is finished. @Daz, The Vista one still works great as far as I know. Both methods are within Windows's trusted platform so can theoretically both be prevented in very similar ways. Ultimately... its all a laugh
@ kpedersen I tried a Vista one a while back and that didn't work for me, I just got a black screen of nothingness and had to restore the bootmgr. I think I would only add this as an option if enough people asked for it, but even then id put some sort of warning along with it. It's not that I got anything against it, it's just I'm trying to think ahead a little and weigh up the pros and cons.
Just tried the second kb780190 and this time the error did not pop up. It went through fine, even said 'Success - Windows Is Activated', but after a reboot the system is still in trial mode.
Unfortunately not, that is at least not with Unlocker. (Couldnt see a handle.) But i can of course try a couple of other things if its important...
Because you got a black screen, does not represent a risk that Microsoft may start to try to prevent this method of offline activation. However, I used my Vista crack on a HP laptop once and it didn't work (I just got a black screen like you), so I am not entirely denying that there are no problems with it. I do believe, if that rare black screen problem is fixed, this is a viiable and clean solution. I am not a personal fan of the grub4dos loader you see Yes, I do apologise, I completely overlooked the fact that in W7, an extra 200mb hidden partition is used. Just give me a few days and it will be fixed for you
That is odd... The software should have done that :S There are known problems with this version (1.0.0) and I am going to get them fixed Thanks!
@ kpedersen Yeah, I'm all for making the loop shorter by cutting out GRLDR but I don't know... there seems more to it, I weight it out like this. Pro: Should work on at least 98% of systems Con: MS can likely detect it (system integrity check) and could work on a update to block it MS patched the Vista bootmgr in the past and rendered some users systems unable to boot into Windows Vista which forced them to format There has to be a reason why this failed on Vista and GRLDR taken over pretty much everything, but I don't go that far back with things.
Daz it still puts a loader in bootmgr, like a little program that does the same as he SLIC emulation code written by binbin used in vista loader 2.1.2, which is the basis for almost all loaders nowadays.
Thats more of a con haha, GRLDR works fine on 100% (minus mac hardware (EPROM perhaps?) I don't know, there has been a recent surge or generic act*vators recently and they all use GRLDR but I think thats more due to the ease of finding and integrating that method into their code rather than due to which method they think is better. Myself, I am more of a "delete every single file / folder beginning with spp" kinda guy. Unfortunately I have noticed that other people like their Windows to be activated and see that nice little logo rather than obliterating the whole WPA system
Well my hunch about the mac issue being related to HFS was right, a guy I know callled zsmin rewrote some SLIC code from scratch and put it on the newest grub4dos which skips straight over the HFS partitions (the new grub4dos was the key) and it was solved. The guy truly is a genuis.
@ Hazar Well it's not using grub4dos at all, but still the older Vista bootmgr mod done pretty much exactly what this one is doing, my question is why did grub4dos overtake this if this would have had a good success rate... @ kpedersen You would be surprised, even on my loader giving out 3 versions of GRLDR it doesn't activate every single system out there -- although it does activate allot of them. Theres a handful that simply refuse it, where as this should have a much better success rate technically. I'm just interested in this and the history behind the Vista one. It just seems crazy to me as to why anyone would want to use grub4dos when you could modify the bootmgr and get away with it... activation, no messing around. I'm just looking for the catch, which might come in a form of a service pack or update. Bleh, I want to try it but at the same time it seems almost too good to be true and theres that little voice in the back of my head saying "MS will defiantly without a doubt block this"
I can confirm that my Mac did not have any HFS partitions, (Wouldn't be allowed to bring it to work if it did) yet I still had problems with the loader method. I literally used eban and killdisk twice to clean the drive.