| reply to roztaylor
Re: [XP Pro] MS Activation - Suspicion Thanks for the various comments--I own spinrite v6. I'm using a neighbor's computer to check. Spinrite has been working on my Maxtor drive since Thursday night. It finished late last night. But it worked--sort of:
System booted into windows with message that some registry entries were corrupt (or something like that) but the bad entries were restored from log.
The "Activate Windows" message pops up when I try to log in and I cannot log in without it. NEW PROBLEM: The activate windows screen pops up, but other than the name in the title bar the "Activate Windows" window is blank.
Of course there is no taskman, no taskbar, nothing...
I haven't searched BBR to see if this has been addressed anywhere. Sigh.
I've been using maxtor IDE drives for many, many years. This is my first maxtor SATA drive. While spinrite was running, it paused because the drive got got. I moved a house fan over near and under my PC and the temps dropped and stayed down. Been meaning to add an HDD cooling fan to my PC--guess I will SOONER rather than later!
Now to see what I can find about a blank "activate windows" window.
Thanks, again!
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Choose to make it a good day... don't wait for something good to happen! |
| Success!
After spinrite finished, I could start windows--up to the activate windows window. But I couldn't actually get into windows because the wizard was a blank window.
I returned to the earlier device and did the chkdsk /r, then bootcfg /list, then bootcfg /rebuild (answered 'no' to the add installation question--didn't know what that meant), and then ran fixboot.
Booted into windows and eureka! There was color, and letters in my activate windows window! Filled in the boxes, and then my elation died--the wizard could not connect to the internet! Rebooted, tried again (and again after a "hard" off)--still no luck.
So I did the telephone activation--wow, it was automated--I didn't have to talk to a person. Turns out the driver (or something) for my network card was corrupted. (Spinrite did report several blocks that had unrecoverable data.) So I used device manager and uninstalled/reinstalled the network card driver and got my internet connection back!
I'm a little nervous about what else is messed. Guess I will play it by ear...unless someone has a "non-reinstall everything" option/suggestion.
Thanks again, everyone!
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Choose to make it a good day... don't wait for something good to happen! |
