Operating System: Windows XP
Kind: Work-around / Fix
Problem:
I ran into a Windows XP machine that had a corrupted OS. I did a repair install. After the repair installation finished, the machine would come up to the windows login page like normal. When trying to login it would say windows needs to be activated first, Yes or No?. If you clicked yes then it would almost load to the desktop, and then it would log itself out. Hence, the activation loop.
Fix:
I used Acronis True Image to image the drive in case something went wrong. Please do not try this if you don’t have a backup or image of the drive before attempting this.
- Restart the machine.
- Choose Safe Mode with Command Prompt by pressing F8 before the windows loading screen.
- type “explorer” or “c:” in the command prompt (This will bring up “My Computer” or “Explorer”.
- Insert your Windows XP install disk.
- Find the “Tools” folder on the Windows installation disk.
- Copy “Tools” to the C: drive of you machine.
- Now in the folder you just copied to the C: drive, extract the deploy.cab
- This will create a folder call “Deploy”.
- Inside the deploy folder, run the sysprep.exe
- Once, sysprep runs choose “Factory Seal”.
- Sysprep will do it’s thing and restart the machine.
- When the system comes up again, you should be able to login to the desktop with no problem.
- Last step very important! When you make it to your desktop sysprep will launch itself. Make sure you “Reseal” the installation for the end-user. You can also check “do not recreate security identifiers” that way it does not recreate new ones.
- The system will reboot one last time, you will put in the windows installation key, and activiate your copy of windows. Everything will be intact and ready for you to login.
Very nice utility/posting… Ran into a problem doing this, however. When running the first Factory Seal, ran into three error boxes (something about not finding "…active activation context". After clearing these, everything seemed to proceed as you describe. However, after rebooting and selecting "Reseal" the system rebooted and is now hung (?) on a "WindowsXP Please Wait…" screen (black screen w/ WinXP logo).
Has been running here for about 5 to 10 mins now. Is this normal, or has something gone awry? How can I recover from this? Actually forced system down at one point and rebooted, but it came back to this screen. How long should this phase take? Any way to get around this? Thanks much
Ooops….my bad… Factory Seal went fine… Got the errors and hang after the Reseal step. I've been at "Please wait…" for about 40 mins now…
Thanks!!! This saved my EEE
And it rebooted just fine within about 10 min or so.
The sysprep.exe routine worked! But Win XP has no `extract.exe' program on the CD or in it's directories. But if you use the Windows explorer and go to the Deploy folder you can highlite all the file names and right click on a hoghlited file, then choose extract.
EVERY TIME I TRY TO GO TO DOWNLOAD GAMES OR GOGLE . iT SAYS ACTIVE ACTIVATION CONTEXT KEY IS NOT ACTIVE. WHAT SHOULD I DO I NEED HELP PLEASE.
IN PAIN ,
EBONICOTTON
Thank god. I have been in a logon loop for days now and searched and searched for a solution. This was it. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Didn't work for me…
Sysprep ran fine, but on reboot still had the the same "You must activate Windows to logon…" message. Selecting yes returned me to the desktop of death… aka desktop going nowhere.
Here is a work around: http://www.experts-exchange.com/OS/Microsoft_Oper...
I am trying to run this but when I hit "reseal" it then tells me that "There is an incompatability between this tool and the current operating system".
Help!