Re: Dell Vista upgrade won't Activate says key is already in use after re-install

A. Choose the option to activate by phone.
Call Microsoft at the number listed for your region, normally takes about 5 minutes.

B. Sometimes this happens with no apparent cause.
I am not sure if your RAID changes can cause this.

--
Jupiter Jones
http://www3.telus.net/dandemar
http://www.dts-l.org


"HDRDTD" <HDRDTD@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:Z-adnQatnvvsGJPbnZ2dneKdnZydnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Dell XPS 410 bought in early December with XP MCE with a free upgrade to Vista Home Premimum

Has anybody run into this yet when upgrading to Vista using the free Vista upgrade from Dell?

The only thing that I can think of that 'might' be the cause is that originally when I got by upgrade, I had two 150gig Raptors in a RAID 0 that I had installed XP Pro on, but I decided to break the RAID 0 so I could install XP Pro on one and Vista on the other so I could dual-boot between the two (I have a third drive for data.

I broke the RAID but left RAID enabled in the XPS 410 BIOS. The drives themselves were left as non-RAID drives.

The installation of XP Pro went just fine, then I installed XP MCE (came with the 410) on the second Raptor and upgraded it to Vista Home Prem. using the Dell Vista upgrade.

Everything seemed to be fine, but as I started using Vista, I noticed the system would freeze for about 20sec every 5 min or so.

I did some research and discovered that it's a known problem/conflict with the Intel RAID, and Vista but that's another story.

Because of this, I decided that since I wasn't using a RAID array anymore anyway, I'd just go back into the BIOS and set the RAID to auto-detect and just used the drives as simple SATA drives.

I Changed the BIOS, then went through the same process again, doing a clean install of XP Pro on the first Raptor, did a clean install of XP MCE on the second Raptor and upgraded that again using the Dell Vista upgrade.

Everything went just fine and the system runs just fine under XP and Vista.

I did this about a week ago, and a couple of times since, I saw a momentary popup appear, something about not being able to activate windows (running Vista at the time) but didn't pay much attention to it.

Last night it popped up again and I clicked on it to see what's up.

It now tells me, 'The product key you typed is already in use'

????

It gives you the chance to enter a new key, so I carefully got out my magnifying glass so my 54 year old eyes could see the damned key code clearly, and retyped in the code on the Dell Vista package. No question I waxs entering the right characters, they were clearly printed and no, there weren't 8's next to B's, etc...

Same error comes up indicateing the key is already in use.

The only thing I can think of is that back when I had Vista installed the first time it may have activated itself automatically and now that I've re-installed Vista it thinks I'm trying tio install it on a second system???

Note: NONE of the hardware in the system has changed. Not one piece. The only difference is the HD's used to have RAID enabled, and now they don't.

I could understand that If I had changed a few components, perhaps Microsoft would have decided that the changes indicated I was trying to install on another system, but I haven't changed a darn thing.

Two questions then.....

A. Since this is a Dell OEM version of Vista, do I go to Dell for a resolution, or because it's a Microsoft issue, do I go to them? Normally I would guess the since it'a an OEM product, support is provided by the OEM.

B. Does it make any sense that just re-installing Vista on the same system (with NO hardware changes) is going to trigger this same activation issue evry time?

.

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