Does Activation Backup and Restore work for Retail?

I understand how Activation Backup and Restore is said to work for OEM copies of Vista.

Does this work for Retail copies as well?

More precisely, I need clarification of this:

So I have a retail Vista 64 which is activated. It was activated by an Upgrade install which was a recovery step from the original activated clean install.

I now have a 200GB 7k200 which I want to consider making my primary disk. If I can easily transfer the activation, I'll do that. Otherwise I'm going to use the 7k200 as a secondary.

 

Just use an HD Cloning / Imaging program to copy your old disk to the new one. No need to transfer activations.

 

I tried Acronis, and it seemed to work, but the activation on the new hard drive is invalid and it is giving me three days to activate.

When you did this was there any particular step needed to preserve the activation?

 

Is the forced activation due to the change in size of the drive?

Or is Vista just not happy about a new drive in general?

 

Probably the change in HD caused the re-activation. You should just be able to do it and it should go through fine...

 

For the first question, ABR wont work in retail copies sicne there wont be any activation automation files in the retail version.

 

Well I have had a less than super smooth experience activating this copy of Vista already - we had to reactivate once because of a turbo memory crash situation, and then again when we had to do an upgrade install to clean up the mess that eventually resulted from file system corruption due to the turbo memory crashes. I'd like to go easy on the re-activation if it isn't necessary. And if it comes to a full reactivation, I might go for a clean install.

Another option is that I might just keep the old primary and use this drive as a secondary, but I like having a battery in the Ultrabay.

 

I would not worry about this too much. If you burn through your activations, just call Microsoft and explain the situation. They'll give you another one.

Oh, and FYI, you have another option rarely discussed here. The Lenovo Rescue and Recovery process works. I installed a retail copy fo Vista Ult, then updated all of it's drivers. I then used the Rescue and Recovery to create a backup. I restored the backup to a different hard drive. Neither was activated but that wasn't what I was trying to accomplish. I was just testing to see if it works. It did.

Another option for those of you using a version of Vista that doesn't include Complete PC, or you haven't purchased another tool like Ghost 12.

 

This will be the third time in a month I would have had to call them on this license. Much as the 7k200 was nice, I have gone back to the 100GB 7k100 and will stick with that as the primary for a while. This way I will let the hardware really stabilize.

I'm going to end up regarding this laptop as a learning experience with respect to Vista, and probably wait to see what sort of next step laptop I take.

One thing I really want to see is Microsoft come out with some announcement about how they will be able to cut their prices because they have stopped piracy with this activation crap. Otherwise they better cut the activation crap.