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I recently purchased a copy of windows xp home and installed it on my DVD writer machine.
I didn't bother with activating it and now that I am past the expirey date I can't seem to get into windows any more.
Anyone got any ideas ?
I have already tried safe mode which will not boot either.
I have items on the desktop which I need to recover. Is their anyway of getting round this ?
It doesn't even give me the option to register the product anymore which I would be happy to do at this stage.
After the expiration date passes it should boot to a screen that lets you know the activation period has expired with a link that asks if you'd like to activate now or something like that.
Either on that page itself or on the page the link takes you to it also gives you a phone number to call where they can activate it for you.
There are a lot of numbers to read, but I have found the phone activation relatively painless. You read them your key, they read you an activation code and your in business.
Hope that helps
i understand perfectly about that mate ... it has 30 days before expired .. i ussualy do registered or just registered later everytime i open the activate windows .. so it still have 30 days .. but never ever happened till it really expired ... why don't you go to M$ base for any information about that ? perhaps they may help you or just reinstall the OS.
You could try to use an emergency repair disk or if you don't have one you can use your reinstallation disk to access your hard drive, you just have to be careful to read what each option is and type the right keys.
Another way could be to make your current hard drive a slave of another hard drive. This will allow you to access your hard drive as you would any other mass storage device, the computer would just run off of the hard drive in the master position.
I'm sure there are more ways but these are just some things you could try
:) Have you tried taking the system clock back by changing the bios time ? :)
Dr_Evil
Hmm, the activation process was put there to stop windows working after 30 days so that people without a valid cd key cannot use windows.
But, if you do have a valid cd key, you can call them up and it will register with them and all will be well.
unless of course you dont have a valid cd key, which usually means that you have a borrowed copy and you didnt buy it.
Correct. All of these ideas to get around the activation expiration or trick the computer into letting you in are worth a try if you are really using a pirated copy of XP.Quote:
unless of course you dont have a valid cd key, which usually means that you have a borrowed copy and you didnt buy it.
If you have a legitimate copy with a legitimate key though you can have it registered properly and legally in less than 5 minutes by web or phone.
I promise I am 100 % genuine with this.
It seems that my problems have arrisen not because of lack of activation but because of a corrupt Volume.
It now says on a blue screen when I boot unable to mount boot volume.
Forgive me for stupidly blaming M$ and Activation.
Which brings me to my next point.
Help , I have lots of info on this partition which I didn't back up anyone know how I can recover it ?
To recover data i found winternal software to be quite good
http://www.winternals.com/
also you could try the free trial versions of Getdata back
http://www.runtime.org/
Hope this helps