mixed up cd problem

  • Thread starter Thread starter KevinC
  • Start date Start date
K

KevinC

I made a mistake, I went on holiday!

We have about 20, Win 2000 Prof machines all with individual licences,
during my holiday one crashed and they (who will be blamed but not named)
reinstalled but in doing so they mixed up all my win2000 installation disks
into different sleeves trying to find the right one. I now dont know which
disk belongs to which product key.

Question. Can I find out which disk belongs to which product key without
trying to reinstall all of them till I find the right one next time we need
to reinstall a system?
 
I have tried doing a reinstall and keep getting an incorrrect product key
message even after trying several valid product keys. I have not tried them
all but at least half a dozen dont seem to work so just assumed you had to
have the correct product key.
 
But I think you will find that the 'correct' product key is with respect to
the machine not the CD, unless you have radically different releases of
Windows on the various CDs.
Normally you would expect to see a sticker on the machine telling you what
key was used to install it. I have an impression that in certain
circumstances you might have one key for multiple machines.
Has the registry been deleted during the reinstall?
Dave
 
We always reformat the partition if not the whole drive when reinstalling to
make sure we have a clean reinstall and no carried over problems.
I dont see how the product key can be machine specific, Microsoft has no
information about the machine it will be installed upon. I agree the product
id it generates on installation could be machine specific but the CD key
must be specific to that CD. Yes I have the stickers on the machines I
label each cd sleeve with the machine name and product key when the machine
is delivered. However I now don't know which cd goes with which machine
since all cd's and sleeves have been mixed up. Just selecting any CD and
trying to do a clean install doesn't seem to work. I have a spare machine on
which I have tried around six win2000 prof CD's with the product key
attached to that machine. And yes the sticker says Windows 2000
Professional and win 2000 prof was originally installed on this machine as
are all our machines. The harddisk is reformatted every time. I cannot see
any way
except going through all the CD's and all the product keys and trying to
install every CD on this spare machine. Eliminating them one by one I
estimate I'll be done around doomsday. Thanks for your help and interest.
 
It doesn't really matter which key is for which CD, as long as they are all
valid, any key should work on any CD

Rich
 
OK, I'm officially puzzled by this one.
What I meant was that once you install, information is inserted to the
registry so that if you reinstall with the registry hives still in
existence, the key you type in will be checked against the key that was
typed in last time.
A reformatted machine should not remember any previous information so I do
not know what the problem is.
Regards,
Dave
 
Back
Top