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Two brand new Desktop PC's have same Win7 licence key 3

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1DMF

1DMF

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Jan 18, 2005
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Hi,

We have just bought two Lenovo ThinkCentre Pc's.

As part of my audit, I keep track of serial numbers and software license keys.

I have ran keyfinder on both machines and they report the same OEM license key.

Is this normal, if not, what is Lenovo playing at?

We have specifically bought Win 7 Pro installed (downgraded) machines, and expect to get genuine, unique license keys for the software, so a wipe and re-install can be performed if required.

Should I be concerned?

Thanks,
1DMF

"In complete darkness we are all the same, it is only our knowledge and wisdom that separates us, don't let your eyes deceive you."

"If a shortcut was meant to be easy, it wouldn't be a shortcut, it would be the way!"
Free Electronic Dance Music
 
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>office politics dictates that so-and-so should have the more powerful computer

Ah, yes. Familiar with that in an earlier life.
 
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Regardless of licensing that may or may not get......... If you image all new computers when they come in and store it, "refreshing" it for it to be a hand-me-down will be much easier and no licensing issues or finding the correct install media either.

I would get a cheap NAS device just for IT for this purpose. Maybe RAID1 and enough storage.

"Living tomorrow is everyone's sorrow.
Modern man's daydreams have turned into nightmares.
 
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Actually, Acronis True Image can make an image and then restore it to dissimilar hardware. I used it when upgrading my system, I went from using a Marvell disk controller using a single disk, to using an Intel controller with a raid 0 SSD setup. Worked like a champ. They call it Universal restore.
 
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The NAS option doesn't work retrospectively for existing users
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Explain this comment. A NAS device or external hard drive holding an image of a PC will allow you to regurgitate it back onto a computer using Acronis or Macrium or Ghost. The idea is put a machine back the way it was either due to a hard drive replacemnt or just to totally refresh Windows before handing it down. We're not worrying about user settings or data.

Sorry, somewhat off topic.

"Living tomorrow is everyone's sorrow.
Modern man's daydreams have turned into nightmares.
 
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Understand the difficulty if you are dealing with individual machines or many groupls of machines but restricting types to 4 or 5 would ease the pain.

One copy of ATI shoulw be sufficient. Do the cloning on one workstation, the drives don't care.

Fought the machine variation issue on a 6 server hospital chain. Took 2 years to get them standardized and spared but well worth the effort.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.
 
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>> A NAS device or external hard drive holding an image of a PC will allow you to regurgitate it back onto a computer using Acronis or Macrium or Ghost.

Perhaps I miss-understand what cloning a current users machine using this software would record, as I assume it would copy all user data, software installed etc.. and one glove doesn't fit all, also I don't want any potential user data, viruses, personal files etc copied, it should be a factory reset, all windows updates, office installed and generic corporate applications,prior to any user account having been set up.

I guess I could create the image from the next new machine that we get, but again, unless I have an Open Licence to use for both OS and Office, the image won't work on all company machines due to their current OEM licencing.

Next time I have to wipe a machine and re-install, I could get it to the generic state then image the system and store for future use on the NAS, that's certainly an option.

Does anyone recommend anything other than Acronis for this or is this the best tool for the job?

Is there any free imaging software available anyone would recommend?


"In complete darkness we are all the same, it is only our knowledge and wisdom that separates us, don't let your eyes deceive you."

"If a shortcut was meant to be easy, it wouldn't be a shortcut, it would be the way!"
Free Electronic Dance Music
 
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Next time I have to wipe a machine and re-install, I could get it to the generic state then image the system and store for future use on the NAS, that's certainly an option."

Since I've standardized on some Dell stuff I make 1 or 2 hard drive images, saving 1 as a master. Whenever I get the urge I let the master update the OS so I am current. My customers are on open office so I don't have to deal with the MS office licensing.

I use an older Acronis running from the CD utility section.

Did the same with one of my 7 machines as I upgraded it to 8, then 8.1, so I have that available if I need it. Supposedly the migration path was going to expire.



Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.
 
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If you are going to create a clean image for each new workstation, then a free alternative is Clonezilla. It comes with a bit of a learning curve, but it does have a lot of options. That should get you by until you're able to move to a MS volume license, in which case you'll want to move to a more robust, centrally-managed system such as Acronis or SCCM.

One minor limitation of Clonezilla you should be aware of deals with hard drive size: you can only restore to the same size drive or larger. For example, if you make a backup on a 512 GB drive, then you can only restore on a 512 GB drive or larger. Other non-free utilities give you the option to restore to smaller drives, but this one doesn't.
 
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With some types of backups, yes it does. Some don't take data and make a copy of it, but a clone, or a bit for bit copy, so even if only 30GB of space used on a 1TB drive, if you cloned it to a backup, it would take 1tb of space, backing up even the "empty" sectors.
 
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That's not very helpful :-(

I think I might simply have to use the Windows 7 Image backup facility to create a disaster recovery image, at least that doesn't clone blank sectors.

"In complete darkness we are all the same, it is only our knowledge and wisdom that separates us, don't let your eyes deceive you."

"If a shortcut was meant to be easy, it wouldn't be a shortcut, it would be the way!"
Free Electronic Dance Music
 
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>One minor limitation of Clonezilla

It is very odd. Although their website does very clearly state "The destination partition must be equal or larger than the source one.", it also says "only used blocks in partition are saved and restored", which would suggest that in principle it ought to be able to restore to partitions smaller than the source.
 
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PAY for something that doesn't have a limitation in going to a smaller hard drive. Most cloning software does NOT create a huge (bit by bit) image. They only clone the occupied blocks. I use Macrium.

"Living tomorrow is everyone's sorrow.
Modern man's daydreams have turned into nightmares.
 
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It's not the limitation that concerns me, it's the storage requirements. I have just bought a 2TB WD Passport to store the images on, wouldn't fit many on it if it did an entire HDD clone.

DR image backup's should suffice and be much smaller, so I can store each machine's recovery files on one USB device for future re-install.

I might even do a dummy run, to be sure I have all I need and it is working.

"In complete darkness we are all the same, it is only our knowledge and wisdom that separates us, don't let your eyes deceive you."

"If a shortcut was meant to be easy, it wouldn't be a shortcut, it would be the way!"
Free Electronic Dance Music
 
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Sorry for the late response. No, backing up a 250GB drive will not consume 250GB to store the backup. In fact, I recently used Clonezilla to backup a 128GB solid state drive that had over 45GB in use. The resulting backup was 24GB.

I was just pointing out earlier that when restoring from backup, you just need to make sure the drive you're restoring to is at least the same size the backup was made from. So in my example here, I would have to restore to a 128GB drive (or larger). It's just a minor limitation to be aware of.
 
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No problem, appreciate you coming back.

As long as the image is shrunk, it's not a problem as the smallest drive any of the computers have is 250GB.

Still running Windows updates and have Office to install, so a while to go before I get to try any imaging.

"In complete darkness we are all the same, it is only our knowledge and wisdom that separates us, don't let your eyes deceive you."

"If a shortcut was meant to be easy, it wouldn't be a shortcut, it would be the way!"
Free Electronic Dance Music
 
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Well I ran a windows image backup overnight to my USB, which worked fine.

So I re-booted the windows install DVD, used the install utility to delete the HDD partitions and ran the repair (system image recovery) option.

Then the fun ensued, firstly the setup environment doesn't have all resources needed to run the WD encryption unlocker, so I couldn't see the backup USB drive.

I had to my machine to remove the password protection, only to find it then couldn't see the backup image and there is no way of browsing the USB device to select the image to restore.

In the end I had to re-attach the USB device to my onw machine, share the folder with the backup image in it, then use the 'network' option and a UNC path to my domain machine to access the backup image across the network.

It's now @ 15% through the restore of the image. Hopefully I will have a working, restored machine at the end of it.

What a pa-larva!

"In complete darkness we are all the same, it is only our knowledge and wisdom that separates us, don't let your eyes deceive you."

"If a shortcut was meant to be easy, it wouldn't be a shortcut, it would be the way!"
Free Electronic Dance Music
 
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