Acronis Best Software Ever!

I was amazed this morning when I successfully imaged my crap old hard drive to a new 400 gig hard drive! Only thing was I had to reactivate windows by calling Microsoft.

Really delighted with the software so far.

 

Normally just changing a hard drive does not call for a Windows re-activation. You must have made some other recent hardware changes that had accumulated several "Change Points" which combined with the drive change caused the re-activation request.

I have swapped main hard drives on a daily basis in the past and the only time I had to re-activate Windows was when I removed an internal modem card and replaced it with an ethernet card.

Xpilot

 

It always happens when I reinstall windows.

Any ways to stop it?

 

I fyour are reinstalling, then activation will be required. If you simply copy what's on one disk to another and replaced the origianl with the new disk, activation is usually not triggered. The triggering is based on the hard-coded id numbers of diff pieces of hardware, if enough of them have changed, then activation is required.

You can read more about it here:

http://www.technibble.com/windows-xp-activation-explained/

and many other places if you google for it.

There are some hacky ways to get around the need for activation, usually involving the activation database, but as a rule they are more effort than merely reactivating.

 

if anyone knows ways to turn off the activation when restoring please let me know.

 

Re:Restoring Windows to new drive without activation

Maybe OT , but see : http://directedge.us/content/abr-activation-backup-and-restore

It works with a new install of Vista 32-bit/64-bit on a new disk, also to change Vista 32-bit to 64-bit on a new disk using backed up activation files. No need to call M.

Ofcourse this is not for restore via ATI ,sorry. if OT, I apologize.

SKA