Just a warning, this weekend I rebooted and Windows XP suddenly decided it needed to be activated again. Expect it then decided it was already activated and went into a loop where it would go from one message about needing activation to another where it said it was activated. The final resolution was to boot in safe mode and kill the registry entries saying it was activated and to reset the windows activation data. 3 hours later, voila it works. If Microsoft had any real competition.....
Without a backup you're lucky your hard drive hasn't crashed. It'll take you a lot longer than 3 hours to recover from that. In fact, you symptom may be a precursor to a hard drive crash. SO BACK UP YOUR COMPUTER NOW!
It was actually a virtual machine and I had a copy of it from the prior week (and nightly backups of all the data), but the copy also decided it needed to be activated. I assume Microsoft changed something on their servers?
there are good alternatives to MSFT - you just must not be lazy. Macs (AAPL) are more reliable but still they try to rip you off on both hardware and software. with Linux it is often hard to get all your programs to run. one possibility is to have a sizable external disk (few TBs) and have all data/settings backed up all the time + have partitioned internal hard disk and install both XP and say Karmic Ubuntu (or have several PCs + Mac). to rely on XP only is insanity - it is getting worse every year and with the windows update switched on it changes every day... cheers
OP I manage close to 50 installs of XP and I have never had that happen to me unless I had a hardware failure, changed hardware, etc. If your software is legit you should be able to call MSFT and activate over the phone even if you have issues over the internet. If its not legit... well then you get what you pay for. Seriously, I'd look over your hardware. If you didn't change anything it might be time to look at your HDD as others have mentioned.
Worse comes to worst, download and burn a Linux Mint iso to CD, boot your system from that, & pull all critical files from the hard drive to a flash drive or the like.
Yes XP SP3. In thinking back I did change the hardware (added a new virtual CD drive) so maybe that caused it. But this infinite loop of activation obviously has occurred before (google it) and I don't get why they don't have a fix for it. The fix I did was for a different activation problem and luckily it worked. And there were many many posts stating that Microsoft support was totally useless, they just said re-install from scratch.
As of February 17, MSFT sent out an update that detects all illigit copies from the new windows 7, vista, XP. If you got auto update on, chances are you have downloaded the patch, and if your windows isnt genuine, it will tell you to go activate it. http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/ge...vation-technologies-update-for-windows-7.aspx That link just says windows 7, but the update affects all versions of windows