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XP Pro activation failing with genuine disk and license RRS feed

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    I have a PC that recently started blue screening and we couldn't get past that, so we dropped a new hard drive and reinstalled XP Pro from the original media with the original license that came with the machine.

    When installation finished it infomred us it had to be activated before it could be used and started taking us to an activation screen. First time thought it just froze. Restarted the machine and this time it got to an activation screen but there was no installation id shown so the phone bods couldnt help me.

    Baring in mind at this stage I havent even been able to install any motherboard drivers how is it requestiong activation?

    More importantly, where do I go from here?
    Thursday, November 27, 2008 7:24 PM

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    Hankyknot,

    A fresh clean installation of XP provides a 30-day grace period during which you can defer activation.

    The purpose of the grace period is for you to have an opportunity to install the drivers for your hardware and your software to ensure that they function properly before you commit to the installation and license by activating it.

    A good clean installation of XP does not have any trouble displaying the activation screens.  I would suspect that the orginal problem may be hardware based, and would also seem to not have been corrected, and this hardware problem is still affecting the integrity of your clean XP installation as it did with the previous XP installation.

    I'd start with a good memory test, like this one from Microsoft:  http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp
    For great advice on all topics XP, visit http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp
    • Marked as answer by Antron Monday, December 1, 2008 5:53 PM
    Friday, November 28, 2008 5:04 AM