My mother unknowingly got a copy of vista home premium which was already
used. After the 30 days, it locked up. I am now trying to get the data off
her computer to revert back to xp media center which was on there before but
vista wont let me in. My last resort will be to remove the hard drive and
extract them manually but don't want to jump to that if I don't have to. Does
anyone know of a way to access windows vista temporarly to retrieve this data?

Consider a valid license.

"vexhold" <vexhold@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:BDCE547A-7FB0-457C-9E3F-5E6F1327609B@microsoft.com...
> My mother unknowingly got a copy of vista home premium which was already
> used. After the 30 days, it locked up. I am now trying to get the data off
> her computer to revert back to xp media center which was on there before
> but
> vista wont let me in. My last resort will be to remove the hard drive and
> extract them manually but don't want to jump to that if I don't have to.
> Does
> anyone know of a way to access windows vista temporarly to retrieve this
> data?

Hi Vexhold--

Do you have a legit product key, because according to the KB below, you can
activate after the 30 days with the PK.

You didn't spec if your mom's Vista is OEM or not. The KB linked below
explains why this might matter.

I assume you mean it's in reduced functionality mode. There are a few types
of reduced functionality mode.

The behavior of reduced functionality mode in Windows Vista
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925582/en-us

I know if you had executed a command prior to the 30 days you could extend
the 30 days several times. I believe it's 120 days. The original 30 day
activation,plus the ability to "rearm" three times.

See:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/win.../plan/faq.mspx

It's possible it's too late now, but perhaps you could still boot to Safe
Mode and try the command.

Try using F8 to get into safe mode, and then at search box above Start
button type cmd>then when cmd pops up>rt. click>run as admin and at the
elevated cmd prompt type: slmgr -rearm

Let me know if this works out.

Good luck,

CH

The pompous media barelling down on Imus hasn't asked the real question.
Why do the corporate conglomerates and those cerebral enlightened patrons of
Gansta Rap now often called Hip Hop continue to make it highly profitable by
buying it, listeniing to it, singing to it, and dancing to it. Check out
the lyrics to:

Back That Azz Up (Little Junior). The lyrics are far more derogatory than
the words Imus used, and in several large cities the tune "Back That Azz Up
You're a Fine ____" by Junvenile
was the #1 selling title for months on end. A current look at Billboard
reflects the same proflific lyrics that denegrate men and particularly women
and perpetuate those bad habits.

http://www.lyricsfreak.com/j/juvenil..._20076776.html

Many large corporations including Amazon, are pleased to make it available
to anyone who can reach a computer connected to the web and pony up the
cash. It is produced by Universal Music Group.

Universal Music Group, aka UMB, a large multinational company is proud to
announce a new agreement with the maker of a new music player called the
Zune. You really have to be a precient insightful detective to discover
that lo and behold, a company called MICROSOFT MAKES THE ZUNE.

http://new.umusic.com/history.aspx

"UMG and Microsoft Corp announce agreement for Zune player."

MSFT is promoting the selling then, of the same derogatory lyrics that got
IMUS off of MSNBC. Does anyone who is bright know what the MS in MSNBC
could possibly stand for besides
Quintissential Hypocrisy??

MSFT embraces promoting Universal Gangsta Rap tunes including "Back That Azz
Up" but NBC kicked Imus off of MS (that'd be MSFT girls and boys) NBC.
Hypocrisy rules. This is never going to change, and take a look at what is
headlined this minute by MSN--a division of --you presciently guessed it
Microsoft (both housed on the Redmond and other soon to be built campuses in
Belleview, etc.).

Frank Rich writes in tomorrow's New York Times about this hypocrisy:

All of this rhetoric about a new dialogue is just specious rhetoric. Things
aren't changing significantly and Imus was made a scape goat as a small
component--much smaller than the Rap lyrics as an offender and it is
halarious to hear Rap artists give their Mickey Mouse arguments that they
are in a different paradigm (no they don't use or know that word).

Frank Rich New York Times Sunday 4/15/07

FRANK RICH: "Everybody Hates Don Imus"

FAMILIAR as I am with the warp speed of media, I was still taken aback by
the velocity of Don Imus’s fall after he uttered an indefensible racist and
sexist slur about the Rutgers women’s basketball team. Even in that short
span, there’s been an astounding display of hypocrisy, sanctimony and
self-congratulation from nearly every side of the debate, starting with Al
Sharpton, who has yet to apologize for his leading role in the Tawana
Brawley case, the 1980s racial melee prompted by unproven charges much like
those that soiled the Duke lacrosse players.

It’s possible that the only people in this whole sorry story who are not
hypocrites are the Rutgers teammates and their coach, C. Vivian Stringer.
And perhaps even Don Imus himself, who, while talking way too much about
black people he has known and ill children he has helped, took full
responsibility for his own catastrophic remarks and didn’t try to blame the
ensuing media lynching on the press, bloggers or YouTube. Unlike Mel Gibson,
Michael Richards and Isaiah Washington, to take just three entertainers who
have recently delivered loud religious, racial or sexual slurs, Imus didn’t
hire a P.R. crisis manager and ostentatiously enter rehab or undergo
psychiatric counseling. “I dished it out for a long time,� he said on his
show last week, “and now it’s my time to take it.�

Among the hypocrites surrounding Imus, I’ll include myself. I’ve been a
guest on his show many times since he first invited me in the early 1990s,
when I was a theater critic. I’ve almost always considered him among the
smarter and more authentic conversationalists I’ve encountered as an
interviewee. As a book author, I could always use the publicity.


Of course I was aware of many of his obnoxious comments about minority
groups, including my own, Jews. Sometimes he aimed invective at me
personally. I wasn’t seriously bothered by much of it, even when it was
unfunny or made me wince, because I saw him as equally offensive to
everyone. The show’s crudest interludes struck me as burlesque.



I do not know Imus off the air and have no idea whether he is a good person,
any more than I know whether Jerry Lewis, another entertainer who raises
millions for sick children, is a good person. But as a listener and sometime
guest, I didn’t judge Imus to be a bigot. Perhaps I felt this way in part
because Imus vehemently inveighed against racism in real life, most recently
in decrying the political ads in last year’s Senate campaign linking a black
Tennessee congressman, Harold Ford, to white women. Perhaps I gave Imus a
pass because the insults were almost always aimed at people in the public
eye, whether politicians, celebrities or journalists — targets with the
forums to defend themselves.


And perhaps I was kidding myself. What Imus said about the Rutgers team
landed differently, not least because his slur was aimed at young women who
had no standing in the world of celebrity, and who had done nothing in
public except behave as exemplary student athletes. The spectacle of a media
star verbally assaulting them, and with a creepy, dismissive laugh, as if
the whole thing were merely a disposable joke, was ugly. You couldn’t watch
it without feeling that some kind of crime had been committed. That was true
even before the world met his victims. So while I still don’t know whether
Imus is a bigot, there was an inhuman contempt in the moment that sounded
like hate to me. You can see it and hear it in the video clip in a way that
isn’t conveyed by his words alone.


Does that mean he should be silenced? The Rutgers team pointedly never asked
for that, and I don’t think the punishment fits the crime. First, as a
longtime Imus listener rather than someone who tuned in for the first time
last week, I heard not only hate in his wisecrack but also honesty in his
repeated vows to learn from it. Second, as a free-speech near-absolutist, I
don’t believe that even Mel Gibson, to me an unambiguous anti-Semite, should
be deprived of his right to say whatever the hell he wants to say. The
answer to his free speech is more free speech — mine and yours. Let Bill O’Reilly
talk about “wetbacks� or Rush Limbaugh accuse Michael J. Fox of exaggerating
his Parkinson’s symptoms, and let the rest of us answer back.


Liberals are kidding themselves if they think the Imus firing won’t have a
potentially chilling effect on comics who push the line. Let’s not forget
that Bill Maher, an Imus defender last week, was dropped by FedEx, Sears,
ABC affiliates and eventually ABC itself after he broke the P.C. code of
9/11. Conservatives are kidding themselves if they think the Imus execution
won’t impede Ann Coulter’s nasty invective on the public airwaves. As Al
Franken pointed out to Larry King on Wednesday night, CNN harbors Glenn
Beck, who has insinuated that the first Muslim congressman, Keith Ellison of
Minnesota, is a terrorist (and who has also declared that “faggot� is
nothing more than “a naughty name�). Will Time Warner and its advertisers be
called to account? Already in the Imus aftermath, the born-again blogger Tom
DeLay has called for the firing of Rosie O’Donnell because of her “hateful�
views on Chinese-Americans, conservative Christians and President Bush.



That said, corporations, whether television or radio networks or movie
studios or commercial sponsors, are free to edit or cancel any content. No
one has an inalienable right to be broadcast or published or given a movie
or music contract. Whether MSNBC and CBS acted out of genuine principle or
economic necessity is a debate already raging. Just as Imus’s show defied
easy political definition — he has both kissed up to Dick Cheney as a guest
and called him a war criminal — so does the chatter about what happened over
the past week. MSNBC, forever unsure of its identity, seems to have found a
new calling by turning that debate into a running series, and I say, go for
it.


The biggest cliché of the debate so far is the constant reiteration that
this will be a moment for a national “conversation� about race and sex and
culture. Do people really want to have this conversation, or just talk about
having it? If they really want to, it means we have to ask ourselves why
this debacle has given permission to talking heads on television to repeat
Imus’s offensive words so insistently that cable news could hardly take time
out to note the shocking bombing in the Baghdad Green Zone. Some even upped
the ante: Donna Brazile managed to drag “jigaboo� into Wolf Blitzer’s sedate
“Situation Room� on CNN.


If we really want to have this conversation, it also means we have to have a
nonposturing talk about hip-hop lyrics, “Borat,� “South Park� and maybe
Larry David, too. As James Poniewozik pointed out in his smart cover article
for Time last week, an important question emerged from an Imus on-air
soliloquy as he tried to defend himself: “This phrase that I use, it
originated in the black community. That didn’t give me a right to use it,
but that’s where it originated. Who calls who that and why? We need to know
that. I need to know that.�



My 22-year-old son, a humor writer who finds Imus an anachronistic and
unfunny throwback to the racial-insult humor of the Frank Sinatra-Sammy
Davis Jr. Rat Pack ilk, raises a complementary issue. He argues that when
Sacha Baron Cohen makes fun of Jews and gays, he can do so because he’s not
doing it as himself but as a fictional character. But try telling that to
the Anti-Defamation League, which criticized Mr. Baron Cohen, an observant
Jew, for making sport of a real country (Kazakhstan) and worried that the
“Borat� audience “may not always be sophisticated enough to get the joke,
and that some may even find it reinforcing their bigotry.�


So if we really want to have this national “conversation� about race and
culture and all the rest of it that everyone keeps telling us that this
incident has prompted, let’s get it on, no holds barred. And the fewer
moralizing pundits and politicians, the better. Hillary Clinton, an Imus
denouncer who has also called for federal regulation of violent television
and video games, counts among her Hollywood fat cats Haim Saban, who made
his fortune from “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.�



Listening to Les Moonves of CBS speak with such apparent sincerity of how
his network was helping to change the culture by firing Imus, I couldn’t
help but remember that one of CBS’s own cultural gifts to America has been
“Big Brother,� the reality game show that cloisters a dozen or so strangers
in a house for weeks to see how they get along. Maybe Mr. Moonves could put
his prime-time schedule where his mouth is and stop milking that format
merely for the fun of humiliation, voyeurism and sexual high jinks. If
locking Imus and his team in a house with Coach Stringer and her team 24/7
isn’t must-see TV that moves this conversation forward, then I don’t know
what is.







"vexhold" <vexhold@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:BDCE547A-7FB0-457C-9E3F-5E6F1327609B@microsoft.com...
> My mother unknowingly got a copy of vista home premium which was already
> used. After the 30 days, it locked up. I am now trying to get the data off
> her computer to revert back to xp media center which was on there before
> but
> vista wont let me in. My last resort will be to remove the hard drive and
> extract them manually but don't want to jump to that if I don't have to.
> Does
> anyone know of a way to access windows vista temporarly to retrieve this
> data?

I get the point here, but thousands of Windows end users don't understand
that they can only use one Windows license at a time on one box. The don't
read EULAs, boxes, the print on packages, any MSFT or other web pages or
much else pertaining to licensure. Often, as in this case, the mother could
have gotten the Vista from another family member (and neither knew the PK
was already in use the one time it could be). It may well have a valid
license with the PK tied up currently.

CH

"AJR" <ajrjdr@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:uktVMdwfHHA.4064@TK2MSFTNGP03.phx.gbl...
> Consider a valid license.
>
> "vexhold" <vexhold@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
> news:BDCE547A-7FB0-457C-9E3F-5E6F1327609B@microsoft.com...
>> My mother unknowingly got a copy of vista home premium which was already
>> used. After the 30 days, it locked up. I am now trying to get the data
>> off
>> her computer to revert back to xp media center which was on there before
>> but
>> vista wont let me in. My last resort will be to remove the hard drive and
>> extract them manually but don't want to jump to that if I don't have to.
>> Does
>> anyone know of a way to access windows vista temporarly to retrieve this
>> data?
>
>

You should be able to "get in" but will run in reduced functionality mode.
While in reduced functionality mode you should at least be able to copy your
data to a removable drive (such as a USB drive for example) or to another
disk and then you can re-install media center from your licensed media.
Alternatively you can activate Vista and gain full functionality.

Joe

"vexhold" <vexhold@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:BDCE547A-7FB0-457C-9E3F-5E6F1327609B@microsoft.com...
> My mother unknowingly got a copy of vista home premium which was already
> used. After the 30 days, it locked up. I am now trying to get the data off
> her computer to revert back to xp media center which was on there before
> but
> vista wont let me in. My last resort will be to remove the hard drive and
> extract them manually but don't want to jump to that if I don't have to.
> Does
> anyone know of a way to access windows vista temporarly to retrieve this
> data?

vexhold

Did you Activate the Vista? Is it a Retail Full version or an Upgrade version or is it a OEM version?

--
Peter

Please Reply to Newsgroup for the benefit of others
Requests for assistance by email can not and will not be acknowledged.

"vexhold" <vexhold@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message news:BDCE547A-7FB0-457C-9E3F-5E6F1327609B@microsoft.com...
> My mother unknowingly got a copy of vista home premium which was already
> used. After the 30 days, it locked up. I am now trying to get the data off
> her computer to revert back to xp media center which was on there before but
> vista wont let me in. My last resort will be to remove the hard drive and
> extract them manually but don't want to jump to that if I don't have to. Does
> anyone know of a way to access windows vista temporarly to retrieve this data?

There are many posts on extending the 'trial' period another 30 days.
Search here and vista.general.

"vexhold" <vexhold@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:BDCE547A-7FB0-457C-9E3F-5E6F1327609B@microsoft.com...
> My mother unknowingly got a copy of vista home premium which was already
> used. After the 30 days, it locked up. I am now trying to get the data off
> her computer to revert back to xp media center which was on there before
> but
> vista wont let me in. My last resort will be to remove the hard drive and
> extract them manually but don't want to jump to that if I don't have to.
> Does
> anyone know of a way to access windows vista temporarly to retrieve this
> data?

I outlined how to do this in this thread. You must not be reading my posts.

CH


"John Barnes" <jbarnes@email.net> wrote in message
news:%235IYaX1fHHA.3676@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...
> There are many posts on extending the 'trial' period another 30 days.
> Search here and vista.general.
>
> "vexhold" <vexhold@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
> news:BDCE547A-7FB0-457C-9E3F-5E6F1327609B@microsoft.com...
>> My mother unknowingly got a copy of vista home premium which was already
>> used. After the 30 days, it locked up. I am now trying to get the data
>> off
>> her computer to revert back to xp media center which was on there before
>> but
>> vista wont let me in. My last resort will be to remove the hard drive and
>> extract them manually but don't want to jump to that if I don't have to.
>> Does
>> anyone know of a way to access windows vista temporarly to retrieve this
>> data?
>