Backup activation for offline reactivation

from Stardock Forums

It is fairly trivial for me to reload windows 7 and 8 on my laptop, I have a process which does the whole thing in less than 5 minutes including drivers and I use it to test things

With Windows 7 and 8 as well as Office 2010 it is possible to backup the activation tokens and restore them in an automated fashion so re-activation is never an issue.

Is there such a thing for start8, that you are willing to share, as if restoring activation on reload is possible I will buy and recommend this product to my customers. Otherwise I will go with a free alternative.

Thanks

start8
2,928 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top

If you are restoring the same image of Windows (as opposed to laying down a fresh installation), then you would have Start8 installed as part of that image and make sure it and \programdata\stardock\registrations\start8sig2267.bin are restored. No access to the Internet would be required as it would already be activated against that OS image.

I don't know what you're using for reloading, but we use several different tools (Rollback RX, the discontinued Time Machine from Comodo, Acronis Trueimage, and a WDS server) depending on what we're doing. Rollback and Time Machine are literally a reboot away from taking you to an image snapshot that you've saved. No need to reinstall anything. Trueimage takes a bit longer, but is a bit more flexible in terms of where you might be keeping that snapshot data. WDS is the slowest and used for deploying images to bare metal.

Kris

 

Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top

How about the built-in Reset and Refresh scenario? If I do a Reset or Refresh of Windows 8 and I have start8sig2267.bin backed up, I should not have to re-activate over the internet. Is this supported/possible?

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Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top

Hi Nakor

Thanks for your reply. I am an expert in all kinds of imaging etc, I have used all software you described as well as ghost, imagex, partclone, fsarchiver even good old dd. I use a mix of reloading as well as reimaging, they both have suitable purposes where reimaging is faster, however reloading allows for universal imaging. As a software developer I reload my machine quite often to test new installation procedures or just if I tested so many programs it becomes unusable etc. Thats why I like to be able to restore activation tokens offline. I am going to purchase the start8 software and if it can do as you suggested I will be recommending to all my customers as your start menu is the best out there and makes windows 8 actually enjoyable to use.  I deal with a lot of technophones out there, who buy new laptops, without a startmenu they will be totally lost.