1

I’ve got a workstation with 64bit Windows 7 Pro installed. The OS is genuine (product key was entered during setup) and was working fine for one week. Got a ticket today with the user reporting an error message that Windows is not genuine.

Sure enough, the PC seems to have “lost” its product key and whenever I re-run the activation tool, the system hangs immediately after entering the key. Any thoughts on what could cause this? Any additional information needed to help troubleshoot?

Thanks.

4 Spice ups
2

Has any hardware changed? Are you using a retail key or volume licensing?

It may be worth trying the Volume Activation Management Tool for activation instead of the OS, just to see if it’ll activate that way.

2 Spice ups
3

No hardware change. Retail key. I’ll try VAMT now and report back.

4

Also do you have a content filtering solution in place. It might be blocking the activation request. If so the filter might need to be temporarily bypassed.

1 Spice up
5

Did this by anychance occur after the windows update that installs the O/S genuine checker?

6

After another look, it seems like this is possibly a permission issue. VAMT is reporting “Access Denied” for the Windows 7 key, however our Office key shows up fine. I tried running on both a local admin and a domain admin account. I’ll look into content filtering as well as Windows Updates.

It might be worth noting that we deployed two identical workstations from the same image in the same office on the same network and only one is having this issue.

7

I ended up using system restore which seems to have fixed the problem, leading me to believe a registry entry may have been deleted “somehow”. I’ll keep an eye on it and post back if the issue arises again. Thanks to everyone for your help!