Robert in CA wrote:
Are you saying that in 72 hours, or 30 days the 8500 will freeze up?!

No. If Windows is in a bad mood, it will place a notification on
the screen, saying the activation issue needs to be resolved.

The activation issue, is with a single disk, and does not
(automatically) reach out and ruin other disks.

If, however, you've made hardware changes (especially, change out motherboard!),
then *every* disk that gets plugged in, will do the same calculation
and conclude the OS is Not Genuine. So in that limited sense, the
problem follows the machine condition around.

If, however, the machine is fine, but malware "ruined" a single drive,
then that drive alone sees the Not Genuine. A Not Genuine can also
occur (on a single drive), the time clock was set to 1970, instead
of 2021, making it look like the user was trying to use a "time trick"
to make Windows run. But again, the Not Genuine determination applies
to that disk alone.

So all the work we did is for nothing?!?!?!?!? So I need to use the slui
otherwise I will loose the 8500 and all the hd we copied are useless
and all the Mrimgs are useless?

Using "slui", on a disk that needs it, is an experiment.

It's an experiment to see if the Not Genuine is a trivial one.

Now, they recommend renaming the tokens.dat file to some
other file name (my choice would be tokens.dat.bak). The tokens
file remembers the determination. I would have expected just
running "slui" to overwrite tokens.dat, but I do find articles
where it needs to be renamed, so there is then room for a
clean one to be made up. Tokens.dat is a local record of the calculations
determining that the OS should be Activated.


Do I need to put the original hd back to do the slui?

No. This "slui" thing is only to be tested on the Not Genuine disk
that you want to become Genuine again.

I type slui in the CMD
prompt via Admin Account and then what? it gives me a phone number?

slui # inspect machine, activate, if OK, just do it.
slui 4 # Feedback received from other command, indicates
# a phone call is required. Slui 4 tells you what
# phone number to use.

If I get my authentication back I can't clone again or it cause the same
problem again, so I'll have no backup hd for the 8500. Correct?

Well, it's an independent issue. The disk in question is the one
which is Not Genuine. The original 1TB drive is still Genuine.

The problem we have, is a problem cloning the original drive and
making a perfect working drive on the 8500. We need to figure out
what does that. I don't know if the phone support for Activation,
are willing to do MGADiag for you (check values). There is a forum
for activation, or at least, there used to be one. It might
be archived now.


I noticed that there was an autorun on the Partiot should I remove it?

It looked to me like perhaps the Patriot either had Windows 10 installer
or a Macrium on it. The autorun might be there to make it automatically
do a certain thing. In this case, the Patriot is most likely to be
an "image" of a DVD, which includes materials a DVD would use, such
as an autoruns.inf .

If on the other hand, you'd just formatted the Patriot, put your Bookmarks
file and nothing else, came back two weeks later and see

bookmarks.html
autoruns.inf

then that would be bad. Because the autoruns doesn't particularly belong
there. The situation does not call for it. It's superfluous. Whereas a
DVD image loaded onto a USB stick, might well legitimately have an
autoruns on it.


We just might have to use the Testdisk on the 780 but right now you have
me very worried about the 8500.

Robert

We have a puzzle to solve.

I try to avoid doing a lot of unnecessary work, like making
you install the OS all over again, reinstall all your
programs and drivers. That would suck. So that's one of my
"constraints", is not doing that. We've spent so much time
on this now, it would have almost been faster to do that.
I don't have any evidence at the moment, that points at
this being a necessity.

But you have a spare disk, if you wanted to experiment with that,
you could. I was hoping the Repair My Computer would work...
but I also know how brittle the "new way" is and the
older methods would likely have worked better (PowerQuest stuff).

Paul