Factory Preinstall help! It's asking to activate Windows.

[Rob]

Hi,

I'm doing a factory preinstall on an X40 (2371) from a set of Recovery Disks from Lenovo.

The very first time it tries to log into Windows (to begin its install of all the factory drivers and stuff) it asks me to activate windows. Since it hasn't installed any of the factory drivers, it can't connect to the internet and therefore logs off and won't let the install continue.

I've never seen this before. Usually when you do the factory install, it loads the certificates and doesn't ask you to activate ever. Has anyone seen this before and have a solution?

Rob

[rkawakami]

I'd look carefully at the recovery disks that you are using. From my experience, you will get Windows asking you to activate if you attempt to use a set of disks on a system that it was not designed for; e.g. loading T23 disks into a T41. The activation request usually comes after getting to the Windows desktop and in lieu of loading any IBM customization routines. It also doesn't log you off the system. At least that's been my experience with disk sets up to the T4x and X3x series.

If you do have the correct X40 disk set, then perhaps completely wiping the hard drive first will help??? I generally do this for my clean OS installs. It's just a habit I've gotten into so I don't know if this will really help or not.

[Brad]

I only have seen a request for activation when the drive had a previous partition that was not erased.

I would remove all partitions and try again.

Brad

[virge]

This happened to me on my recently acquired X31 using X31 restore CDs. On the second try I did the following:

1. Run PC doctor off CD drive and do a complete wipe of the hard drive.
2. Insert Disk One of restore CDs.
3. Boot to Bios and select "Restore Defaults"
4. Reboot from CD drive to start restore process.

Since I've only used the restore CDs a few times, I'm not sure what exactly is causing the activation sequence. I just know that using the above steps, I've been able to avoid it.

[Rob]

Thanks for all the suggestions. I double checked: the CD is the correct one for machine type and I tried running it after wiping all the partitions off the hard drive.

I'll have another go at it with putting the bios settings to their default.

Rob

[carbon_unit]

Are you by any chance interrupting the process before it is done? Windows will reboot several times before it is finished. It should present you with a "Welcome to Windows" screen and ask you for your information (time zone, username, etc).

[savarin]

I had a similar problem - the installation stopped and I was asked to type the product code. I realized that I had started the installation process with F12 - the choice of boot device - and I selected CDROM.

When I tried to install for the second time I changed the booting. I did not use the F12 key but I changed the BIOS settings first - the CDROM was set as the first booting device. And the problem was solved.

[mpcook]

This happened to me one time on a T23 w XP. I followed instructions and called Microsoft. With no problem at all, they gave me a key and everything then went fine.

[Rob]

Hey, it's been awhile and I had basically given up and was ready to call Microsoft to get an activation key, but I had an epiphany yesterday and got it working.

Since the factory preinstall uses an IBM Thinkpad cd-key, it looks at the bios to see if it's allowed to run on that computer. My bios was very out of date, so I updated the bios and now the preinstall is functioning as it should

Thanks for all the suggestions.
Rob