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A standard procedure when someone receives a computer upgrade for our company is to do a P2V copy of their old one, in case we miss something important on their new machine.

This has worked flawlessly for years, but the most recent P2V conversion we've done has had an adverse affect on Windows Genuine Validation. It re-activated just fine, but 20 minutes later:

Windows not valid

It's not a huge issue (they're really just there for safety purposes and spend most of their life shut down) but it's a bit unprofessional when you're presented with that message when you log in.

Mark Henderson
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  • Was the Windows license purchased through volume licensing or as OEM? – Nic Jan 24 '11 at 00:43
  • @Nic - OEM license (from the bottom of the laptop, not the VL key that they come pre-shipped with) – Mark Henderson Jan 24 '11 at 01:12
  • @Nic - I just changed it to a spare key from our technet subscription but it's the same story. – Mark Henderson Jan 24 '11 at 01:34
  • Weird. Maybe try doing a full sysprep and re-entering the key? That should make it happy with the virtual hardware. – Nic Jan 24 '11 at 01:38
  • Windows will flip out when you make large changes to the hardware, a P2V would certainly cause this. What kind of license was this? – BenGC Jan 24 '11 at 02:57
  • @Ben - it certainly asked to re-activate, and that went succesfully, but I wouldn't expect it to become ungenuine after this. – Mark Henderson Jan 24 '11 at 02:57
  • (it was an OEM license originally, but I've just changed the license key to one of our spare Technet keys and I'm getting the same message) – Mark Henderson Jan 24 '11 at 02:57

1 Answers1

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So, it turns out my first activation was too soon. I activated it as soon as the activation window showed up, but on a subsequent restart the VM was re-configured by SCVMM which caused the VM to become invalidated.

For whatever reason, the Genuine Validation tool didn't detect that a re-activation was all that was required. I ran slui manually and forced the activation, and all the messages went away.

Moral of the story: Don't reactivate a Windows 7 VM running with SCVMM until you're sure it's finished re-configuring the guest.

Mark Henderson
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