I used a Seagate free tool called Seagate DiscWizard (based on Acronis TrueImage) to image my old Seagate drive over to a new Intel X25-M SSD 80GB drive. This is my workstation and not a gaming station so even with XP, Solidworks, Adobe Creative Suite, Quickbooks Enterprise, etc. the installation was only about 25GB (counting the swap file!). This worked well but I got an activation warning. I don’t remember the syntax but basically the oobe service failed whenever I tried to activate. Ok, great. So I do some work not really worrying about this ( I looked into it and tried some solutions but nothing was effective to this point) and reboot my computer about a week later. Here is where the genius comes into play.

When I reboot into windows and click on my profile to login, I get a warning saying:
A problem is preventing Windows from accurately checking the license for this computer. Eror Code: 0x80004005

After this error message, I am logged off automatically. Ok, so this is a catch-22, a loop I can’t get out of because I can’t get into windows but I also can’t activate my product. So I look around the internet a bit and find LOTS of people doing recoveries or plainly performing complete re-installs. Now, this being a business computer, I have WAAY too much time in customizing what I want and even my last image has a lot of changes that I would not like to go through again (image from just 1 week ago). The just reinstall it method is a HUGE waste of my time.

So I do the following based on a few posts like this:
http://www.anetforums.com/posts.aspx?ThreadIndex=27591

Open your computer in safe mode, open a command promt

Register the following DLL s
it should be in the %system root% system32 folder

just type the following statements one by one and see you got success information popup

regsvr32 licwmi.dll
regsvr32 regwizc.dll
regsvr32 licdll.dll
regsvr32 jscript.dll
regsvr32 vbscript.dll
regsvr32 msxml.dll
regsvr32 shdocvw.dll
regsvr32 softpub.dll
regsvr32 wintrust.dll
regsvr32 initpki.dll
regsvr32 dssenh.dll
regsvr32 rsaenh.dll
regsvr32 gpkcsp.dll
regsvr32 sccbase.dll
regsvr32 slbcsp.dll
regsvr32 cryptdlg.dll

Be sure to use Safe mode without networking because the networking will require the same activation! This didn’t solve my problem so I did this:

I have verified these files:

WindowsSystem32secupd.dat
WindowsSystem32oembios.dat
WindowsSystem32oembios.bin

Problem still not solved, next step (Method 2 as listed in this link):
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;306081

Now this did in fact work! My computer was up for one day and mentioned nothing about licensing. On my next reboot (after Adobe updates and working on enabling AHCI mode for this new SSD drive), I was again stuck in a loop of MS stupidity.

In the end, I had to get a hacking tool which disables the winlogon.exe check title ” Windows 2003 & XP & LH Anti Product Activation Crack 2.0.1″. Normally I do not advocate cracking software but this is a legal copy, all my software is legitimate and there was not “legal” way to fix this waste of my time. Adobe also has some terrible licensing requirements and despite purchasing their software, I have had to crack their software in the past to get my LEGAL copy to work. Apparently we are reaching the point where the hacking solution is faster, more effective and smarter than spending hours looking for the right way to do things. If I had used this XP crack to begin with, I would have saved myself hours of wasted time. Thanks Microsoft!

I have been installing Intel X25-M SATAII SSD 80GB drives in a few computers here at work and WOW, what a difference! However, this brings up some questions about the computers these drives are being installed in. This weekend I was working with Vista Business 64-bit with a Gigabyte EP45-UD3P board which had almost as many issues as a 2006 install of XP 64-bit edition on a Tyan 2892 board. I was NOT impressed with the errors I ran into and my impressions of Vista continue to be very poor.

(Sidetrack – Seriously, how many times do I need to confirm my actions? It is actually easier to go into a command line and sudo my commands in Ubuntu than deal with all this confirmation crap, I am constantly reminded of this Apple commercial when working with drivers and software installations in Vista Click to see Vista Security Video)

One of the issues was making sure AHCI would work to support the highest feature level and best speed of this intel drive. This involves installing the Intel Storage Matrix Manager from this location:
Intel Storage Matrix Manager Download

This worked well once installed despite all the default drivers not allowing AHCI. This brought up a question about another computer here, a Gigabyte EP35-DS3L (commonly misspelled as EP35-D3SL for some reason) which has the same intel drive. This computer had the basic sata II to ide intel drivers. Although this chipset CAN support AHCI, Intel chooses to disallow their AHCI drivers from being used with the ICH9 standard chipset. Many have pointed out this is likely a marketing endeavor but frankly it is stupid. The result is that you have to modify the Intel Storage AHCI driver a bit to work with this chipset. It took a while but I found a workable solution that allowed the setup of the appropriate AHCI drivers which required some bios changes and another reboot or two here:

AHCI on ICH9 Guide which worked in my EP35-DS3L based computer

Another Excellent Guide