After remoting into my domain controller I recently upgraded to Server 2008 R2, I very briefly saw a balloon tip pop up that said: “Invalid Windows Activation” (or something close to that). That was odd as I was sure I had already activated the server. I shudder to think what would happen if your domain controller times out!
Looking at the computer properties, I saw the following:
Clicking on the activate link brought up the totally intuitive error:
<Rant> What’s wrong with a freaking text message? An error code of 0x8007232B is always completely intuitive. </Rant>
Ah, there’s the “More information” link that should tell me what’s going on.
<Rant2>What DNS name!?</Rant2>
Seeing that Windows wasn’t going to help me at all, a quick web search turned up a Knowledge Base article, 929826. That article discusses activation problems with the 0x8007232B error when using Key Management Services and volume licensing. Since I’m not doing any of that, I wasn’t sure what was going on. However, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out I needed to reenter my product ID and try again. That fixed the problem, but checking all my servers I upgraded to Server 2008 R2 none were activated.
I took one of my backups that had Server 2008 for a machine and ran through the upgrade to R2 process to see if I could see what happened. I hadn’t realized it, but upgrading from Server 2008 to Server 2008 R2 doesn’t ask you for a product key. So, if you are upgrading servers, add a step to your checklist that you need to manually go into the properties and change the product key to a valid version after the upgrade. If you need to set the product key on a Server Core installation, use the following commands:
slmgr /ipk <Product Key>
slmgr /ato
As this caught me by surprise, I thought I’d share with others. Thankfully, I caught this before my servers went into reduced mode.
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Thank you very much for this post.
We recently updated from Server 2008 to r2 and saw the registry being spammed with activation related errors.
After reading your post we realised we didn't have a valid r2 key! I was worried we would have to reinstall!