When in doubt, paste into Notepad then cut from Notepad and paste into wherever. I do this regularly to remove all formatting from cut & paste when I know the paste won’t be clean enough. I do this even when I want to paste this into Excel or somewhere.
I have found, however, if you are using the Certificates MMC and are looking at a cert, then copying the thumbprint and pasting into Notepad (or anywhere), there will be one invisible character at the very front so even copying from Notepad won’t be clean. My trick there is to start at the 2nd character of the thumbprint, delete everything prior, then retype the first character. Oh, the little tricks we learn…. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Charles F Sullivan Sent: Monday, September 28, 2015 7:12 AM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [NTSysADM] WYSI(Not Always)WYG I guess it’s a mystery not worth pursuing. Not only did I not have this issue with the 2012 R2 key from our previous agreement, but I can no longer reproduce the problem, at least not in the Windows System Image Manager. After having successfully typed in the correct key there, replacing it with a copy and paste of the same key from the same downloaded product key file, I get no errors. From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>] On Behalf Of Graeme Carstairs Sent: Monday, September 28, 2015 4:31 AM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: Re: [NTSysADM] WYSI(Not Always)WYG Ive had that happen with Server 2012 R2 always had to type in the key not copy and paste it. Never wondered why, just went with one of those peculiarities as it always worked fine 20081 Graeme On 28 September 2015 at 08:58, Rene de Haas <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Maybe the dashes? If you type the numbers you don't need to add them. Op 25 sep. 2015 20:54 schreef "Charles F Sullivan" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>: 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 -- Good news everyone, you have just received an e-mail from me! Attention: Information contained in this message and or attachments is intended only for the recipient(s) named above and may contain confidential and or privileged material that is protected under State or Federal law. If you are not the intended recipient, any disclosure, copying, distribution or action taken on it is prohibited. If you believe you have received this email in error, please contact the sender, delete this email and destroy all copies.
