I ran into a problem today that is beyond my understanding and although I was able to get around the problem, I’m hoping someone here can explain why it would happen.
The short story is that we have a new MS VL agreement with new product keys. I copied and pasted the Windows 2012 R2 key from the XML file that I got off the VL site into the usual field in the System applet, but the OS sees it as invalid. If I instead type in the key, it succeeds. There were absolutely no spaces at the beginning or end. Being that it was a copy-and-paste there really was no reason to painstakingly go through to confirm each character, but I did anyway. Copying and pasting the new key for the Windows 2008 R2 servers from the same XML file gave me no trouble. The longer story is that I was using Windows System Image Manager as I always do to update the answer files and that utility flagged the 2012 R2 key as invalid. Because I triple checked it, I assumed a bogus error, especially since it is the Windows 10 version of the utility. This was a big mistake on my part because the “bad” key in the answer file actually caused the image to be unusable. A deployed server gets stuck in a reboot loop with Sysprep errors. Again, typing the key into the answer file instead of pasting it from the Clipboard did the trick. So what can be copied and pasted that can’t be seen in a scenario like this? Charlie Sullivan
