OEM Vista – No Option to Activate By Phone

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Acer Aspire77 Vista Home Premium original on laptop with sticker. Upgraded hard drive. Now won’t activate, it says invalid.  The laptop was working fine. Still works great for what I am using it for (other than full hard drive).  Cloned hard drive to larger hard drive. Now Windows will not activate with certificate on the bottom of the laptop. It does not give option to activate by phone. I found activate by phone number, but without “code” given in the activate by phone application, they will not activate it. Does anyone have the “code”?

The activation operator cannot help you without the code that is generated to give to her. This is a set of 9 7-digit numbers. She would then read back 9 sets of alphanumeric characters to use as the activation code. If the 9 sets of 7-digit numbers are stored in the registry or a file, all I need to know is where to look. Otherwise, the Acer version of the slui.exe does not have an activate by phone option. If the “code” comes from a file or the registry, where is it?  I am looking at the slmgr.vbs file to see if I can figure out where it goes for the routine.

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Two things you can try:

Open command prompt as admin and enter these two, replacing the X with your actual product key.

slmgr -ipk xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx
slmgr -ato

If that doesn’t work, run ‘slui.exe 4’ instead and that should give you the phone option.

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Running slmgr -ipk xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx

Returns Windows Script Host window: Run ‘slui.exe 0x2a 0xC004F050’ to display the error text.  Error: 0xC004F050
Did not run slmgr -ato after that error.

Run ‘slui.exe 4’ gives the photo attached.

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TennesseeMan wrote:

Run ‘slui.exe 0x2a 0xC004F050’ to display the error text.

Doing that gets this:

Windows 11 Pro version 22H2 build 22621.1778 + Microsoft 365 + Edge

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Run the following command from an elevated cmd prompt and it’ll output the full license info to the file “LicenseInfo.txt” in the root directory of drive C:

cscript C:\Windows\System32\slmgr.vbs /dlv > C:\LicenseInfo.txt

The 9 x 7 code you need is the Installation ID (note: it won’t be nicely divided into 9 7 digit groups, you’ll need to do that yourself.)

If you want to save the info someplace else or give it a different name, simply change C:\LicenseInfo.txt to whatever path\filename you want.

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It returned the following:

C:\Windows\System32\slmgr.vbs(1000, 9) (null): 0xC004E017

 

The txt file had the following:

Microsoft (R) Windows Script Host Version 5.7
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Did I miss something.  I did this as administrator.

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See https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/get-help-with-windows-activation-errors-09d8fb64-6768-4815-0c30-159fa7d89d85#:~:text=0xC004F050,new%20product%20key.

Windows 11 Pro version 22H2 build 22621.1778 + Microsoft 365 + Edge

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Error codes 0xC004E017 and 0xC004F050 both mean the same thing; the Software Licensing Service (slsvc.exe) reported that the product key is invalid.

My suggestion before proceeding any further is:

• Reinstall the old drive and boot into Windows
• Download ShowKeyPlus Version: 1.1.18.0
• Extract and run ShowKeyPlus.exe
• Verify the product key it displays actually matches what’s on the sticker.

If the keys do not match, use the one displayed by ShowKeyPlus.exe to try and activate Windows on the new drive.

If the keys do match, then either the license validity interval has expired or the license is not signed correctly.

Running slmgr.vbs /xpr will display the license expiration info (an approved license will show “The machine is permanently activated“) If it shows as expired, I’m not exactly sure how you’d go about fixing it.

If it’s not expired but shows as inactive, your Licensing Store may be corrupted. Here’s how to fix it.

From an an elevated cmd prompt (i.e. Run as administrator)

net stop slsvc
     ⇒ if it asks if you are sure, select yes.
cd %windir%\ServiceProfiles\NetworkService\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\SoftwareLicensing
rename tokens.dat tokens.bak
cd %windir%\system32
net start slsvc
cscript.exe %windir%\system32\slmgr.vbs /rilc
     ⇒ may take a long time to complete, please be patient.
Restart your computer twice.

You may need to reenter the Product Key and/or reactivate Windows.

3 users thanked author for this post.

lmacri, TennesseeMan, Cybertooth

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You are the man!  That worked!  Wow Great Job!  Thank you so much!

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Glad I could help.

For future reference, in case someone else encounters the same problem, which suggestion fixed it for you?

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From an an elevated cmd prompt (i.e. Run as administrator)

net stop slsvc
     <span class="gdbbx-bbcode-font-color"><strong class="gdbbx-bbcode-bold">⇒ if it asks if you are sure, select yes.</span>
cd %windir%\ServiceProfiles\NetworkService\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\SoftwareLicensing
rename tokens.dat tokens.bak
cd %windir%\system32
net start slsvc
cscript.exe %windir%\system32\slmgr.vbs /rilc
     <span class="gdbbx-bbcode-font-color"><strong class="gdbbx-bbcode-bold">⇒ may take a long time to complete, please be patient.</span>
Restart your computer twice.

You may need to reenter the Product Key and/or reactivate Windows.

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