Vista Deactivation

Last night I experienced a very real Vista bug that had the ability to disable my machine.

Two automatic updates were downloaded, one for my lenovo/intel graphics system and the other was a driver for my wireless card. After the drivers were installed the system rebooted. As it rebooted, Vista posted an information message to the effect that my copy of Vista Business was not valid and had been inactivated. This was most puzzling as my 3000 n100 is little more than a month old and I removed it from a Lenovo sealed box. The "reduced functionality" state was thorough. It was "time to payup" or shut down. Even if I had reason to pay it would not have been possible as there was no way to connect to the net.

I was pretty non-plussed as I entered in the Product Key on the bottom of my laptop. I became concerned when it rejected the key many times. So I put in a Lenovo warranty call. We reset my bios to no avail. it was suggested to either replace the mother board or talk to the Microsoft Electonic Keys people. Replacing the motherboard seemed ridiculous since the machine had been flawless prior to the reboot. We found out that Microsoft Electonic Keys office was only open mon-fri 9 to 5 PDT.

I have long deleted my recovery partition but I did have a recent Complete PC Backup on dvds. I installed the first dvd and fell asleep during the restoration of the seond disk only to awaken to find a fully functioning system as the backup had completed.

In researching this I found that this is a REAL Vista bug and it's been published since march although Lenovo made no mention of it. If they had know about it, it's unlikely that they would have recommended replacing the motherboard.

There is a Knowledgebase article here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931573/en-us

Essentially this says this could happen to anyone running Vista with a preconfigured OEM system.

It supplys remedies, most of which are useless. It advises downloading a patch and rebooting seemingly forgetting that in this condition Vista is locked down and not capable of supporting the operations. Their only useable remedy would have been to called the Microsoft Electonic Keys people and suffered the loss of my machine for three days.

There are a couple of disturbing things. This is is supposed to be prophylaxis for this bug. There have been subsequent updates since I tried this so I don't know what patches my machine had but when I applied this patch to my laptop, i received a message saying the patch was not applicable to my machine - an ambiguous message to say the best.

So be forewarned and forewarned means to walk don't run and

1.) Make a complete PC Backup of your disk (available on Vista Business and Ultimate).

2.) Be absolutely sure that you have a bootable Vista Recovery disk for restoring the backup image.

3.) Be aware that this recovery method will not protect data created or collected after the date of this backup. It would behoove then to create a data partition. My data partitions were not effected by the replacement of my operating system. Yours would be if your data is going into the Users directory tree.

BacKing up is the only surefire protection from this. So backup with tolerable granulaities for dataloss.