Bah, VLK showing up as illegal Windows copy

Nasty_Savage

Nasty_Savage

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Mar 19, 2001
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I guess our VLK got flagged by Microsoft. Some of our imaged machines are showing various pop up messages now :mad: Either that or our stupid install team used the wrong key or Microsofts patch is flawed :p

Man I can't go out and re-image 1000 machines by myself and take care of everything else I have to do too. Is this a known bad patch anyone is experiencing maybe before I go nutty trying to fix it?
 
I'd call MS before doing anything. I haven't heard of any new widespread key issues.
 
you sure its not a WGA issue? Lot's of bugs with "genuine" verification.
 
da sponge said:
I'd call MS before doing anything. I haven't heard of any new widespread key issues.
Click to expand...
Your VLK is usually found here. I would verify the key first, if correct find out who has access to the site password. do call MS, explain the situation, they can get you a new VLK. These keys are like gold
 
So there's verifiable WGA issues? This seemed to happen overnight, and its not just happening within my school district (my organization covers about 40). I do not have access to that site, that would have to go through the assets manager.
 
Nasty_Savage said:
So there's verifiable WGA issues? This seemed to happen overnight, and its not just happening within my school district (my organization covers about 40). I do not have access to that site, that would have to go through the assets manager.
Click to expand...

This hasnt happened to me, but i have another admin friend who had this happen on his VLK images. It wasnt a SID issue, he just had to uninstall some WGA patch and it was fine.
 
WGA is pretty crappy -- I have had 2 systems out of 10 that use the same VLK fail WGA for no apparent reason. The only thing that I have read is that if your system clock is off by more than a few seconds, that can cause your computer to fail validation :-/

Also this site has some other documented failures of WGA
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/
 
we had some imaged computers here do the same thing. they all used the same key, but some just would not validate. try deleteing this file:

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Windows Genuine Advantage\data\data.dat

Reboot, and see if you are still having issues. Apparently deleting data.dat forces WGA to recompute the license key, which (at least in my case) solved whatever problem it was having.

I have also heard of people going to windows update and clicking the "Get Genuine" link. This has also worked for me in the past...
 
use a keyfinder (magicaljelly bean...) to check the installed key against what you know is good
 
are these machines freshly implemented/imaged? if it's the first time they're firing up, you might check the bios. the wga thing has been choking on a couple machines using a corporate key; i was beating my head against it until someone pointed out the bios date on the hardware was WAY off. this was triggering the error.

unfortunately i had to reimage after i set the date, once it got flagged windows wouldn't validate.
 
It appears to have gone away, it seems as if it were an October 2nd database issue. The machines are brand new and were imaged over a month ago.
 
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