Don't know for sure, but it's possible that it was not plain ASCII text - might have been unicode, and that might have borked it.
I'd copy/paste into notepad++ or some other editor first, then into your app, and see if that makes a difference. Kurt On Fri, Sep 25, 2015 at 11:52 AM, Charles F Sullivan <[email protected]> wrote: > 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
