MS Office activation issue

B

bcutts

Bit poster
I'm running 3120 beta Parallels and using my Boot camp Windows XP installation as the 'system' drive.

The first time I used the partition under Parallels, Windows XP required re-activation since there had been 'significant hardware changes to my system'. This was OK and it stays actvated when running either under Boot Camp or Parallels.

However, MS Office 2003 & MS Visio Professional 2003 have a problem. In the same manner as XP, the first time I accessed the Boot Camp partition from Parallels and ran up the programs, they required re-activation. This went OK but now when I go back to Boot Camp, they require re-activating again! Clearly MS will get a bit sniffy if I keep re-activating every time I cahnge from working under Parallels to working under Boot Camp.

I did a quick search of the forum and couldn't find anyone with a similar problem so I'm wondering... is this issue unique to my system?

Brian
 
bcutts said:
I
I did a quick search of the forum and couldn't find anyone with a similar problem so I'm wondering... is this issue unique to my system?

Brian
Click to expand...

Nope. It's an issue. Hopefully it will be fixed by the release version. In the meantime, most people are just using it in one or the other.
 
Hello,
you could try to set in the Parallels VM the same MAC address that BootCamp uses. In my C2D MacBook Pro it is the MAC address of the Bluetooth adapter, as shown with the IPCONFIG/ALL command.
It worked for me, as I could activate MS Office 2003 inside Parallels and it still was activated under BootCamp. The only question mark is that I'm using a Microsoft Action Pack activation code.

If this works for MS Office, it could even work for the Windows XP activation itself, but I already activated it before thinking at this, so I will test it in the next days on another MBP in my company.

Hope this helps
 
Thanks for the info guys. I'll try the MAC address fix that Enrico has suggested since I too am running MS Office from my Microsoft Action Pack bundle. As for fixing th problem with Windows XP activation... that isn't a problem on my system for some reason (MacBook 1st generation)

Brian
 
I'm new at this. Would you please explain the steps required to set the MAC address in Parallels to be the same as in Boot Camp?
 
How to set the MAC address

First you have to see which MAC address you have while in BootCamp:
Start => Run => cmd => ipconfig/all
you get a list of all the networks cards recognized by the system together with their MAC address, something like 00-12-34-56-A0-EF
The one you need should be the last one in the list
Write it down without the dashes, reboot in Mac OS and launch Parallels. Go to the newtork settings of your VM and in the Advanced tab you have the MAC address field.
Done (at least hope so).
 
Enrico said:
First you have to see which MAC address you have while in BootCamp:
Start => Run => cmd => ipconfig/all
you get a list of all the networks cards recognized by the system together with their MAC address, something like 00-12-34-56-A0-EF
The one you need should be the last one in the list
Write it down without the dashes, reboot in Mac OS and launch Parallels. Go to the newtork settings of your VM and in the Advanced tab you have the MAC address field.
Done (at least hope so).
Click to expand...
Enrico,
Thanks. I'll give it a try.
 
Going to sound stupid

Write it down without the dashes, reboot in Mac OS and launch Parallels. Go to the newtork settings of your VM and in the Advanced tab you have the MAC address field.

Thank you for the above suggestion. Yes the MAC address is different and so yes I suspect that that is the issue. However can I ask for some idiot steps for the above process. I am an extensive windows user so I know how to get the mac address however I just don't know how to change it as part of the next step.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

JJJ
 
How to set the MAC address - Detail

Hello Jensenoz
In Parallels go to the Edit menu, choos Virtual Machine...
In the configuration window click on Network Adapter1 and then in the upper right corner click on Advanced.
Here you can find the MAC address field.
See the attached screenshot.
 

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OK... sorry for the late reply but I've been tied up with work and haven't had time to fiddle with Parallels for a week or so.

But... changing the Mac address in Parallels to match the WiFi one for the Boot Camp session worked a treat so no more activation woes for both Office and Visio!!

Thanks Guys.
 
Enrico said:
First you have to see which MAC address you have while in BootCamp:
Start => Run => cmd => ipconfig/all
you get a list of all the networks cards recognized by the system together with their MAC address, something like 00-12-34-56-A0-EF
The one you need should be the last one in the list
Write it down without the dashes, reboot in Mac OS and launch Parallels. Go to the newtork settings of your VM and in the Advanced tab you have the MAC address field.
Done (at least hope so).
Click to expand...

Enrico: Thanks so much for this post. This was getting to be very aggravating and your help solved the problem for me! Thanks!:D
 
Any Issues with Using the Same MAC Addresses in both OSs?

I'm so glad I found this thread, as I have had to reactivate MS Office several times and it was really starting to peeve me.

A question comes to mind before I make the MAC address change in Parallels, though - my Boot Camp Windows XP uses the same MAC addresses for the Ethernet and Airport as OS X does - they are hardware based. So if I change my Parallels XP MAC addresses to be the same as those from Boot Camp, I will have both OS X and the VM XP using the same MAC addresses. Any idea if that will lead to other problems?

Mike
 
mtlee said:
So if I change my Parallels XP MAC addresses to be the same as those from Boot Camp, I will have both OS X and the VM XP using the same MAC addresses. Any idea if that will lead to other problems?
Click to expand...
I'm no expert on the networking side, but I did find at least one reference that suggested that duplicated MAC addresses are only a problem if they are within the same "segment" of a network.

I believe that at least with the "shared" option for the LAN under Parallels, the Windows instance is in a different segment of the network and so the duplicate MAC address isn't a problem. I'm less sure about the other networking options. I also don't know what problems would happen; that is, it's possible it might *seem* to work okay for awhile and then something would get screwed up.

Personally, even though I'm using the "shared" option and in theory that should be okay, I don't like the idea of a duplicated MAC address on the network. Fortunately, under Boot Camp you can override the hardware default MAC address for the network adapter:

With administrator privileges, view the Properties of the adapter and click the "Configure" button. In the list of settable options for the adapter there's one called "Network Address". Enter a new, unique MAC address here to override the built-in address, then use the same address in Parallels.

Doing that, Boot Camp and Parallels will both use the same MAC address, *and* the address will be different from the one the Mac OS is using. (It's possible you could do this the other way, by changing the MAC address for Mac OS, but I haven't found a way to do that).

For the "unique" MAC address, all I did was add 1 to the actual hardware address. That makes it easy for me to "remember" what it is (that is, I can always just look at the actual hardware address and derive my new "unique" address). Keeping in mind it's a hexadecimal number, of course so there's no 1 to carry unless the last digit is "F". :)
 
Thanks PeteD - a clever solution. Can you hear the sound of my hand slapping my forehead (why didn't I think of that...)?

Now I just have to remember to do it next time I boot up in Boot Camp!
 
I've tried the MAC Address method. In fact I've tried all three of them (Airport, Ethernet and Bluetooth) but Office still asks me to validate. Did I miss anything that I need to check on? (I'm using Parallels v.3188 & Windows XP Pro)
 
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MacChelsea said:
I've tried the MAC Address method. In fact I've tried all three of them (Airport, Ethernet and Bluetooth) but Office still asks me to validate. Did I miss anything that I need to check on? (I'm using Parallels v.3188 & Windows XP Pro)
Click to expand...
Hard to say. All we as users can do is verify that the basic technique is sound. However, given the lack of cooperation from Microsoft andParallels, when the technique of changing the MAC address doesn't work, it's difficult to say whether you've done it wrong or there is simply some other aspect of the hardware configuration that turns out to be different on your computer between Boot Camp and Parallels.

If you are sure that you've matched the MAC address for the adapter in use under Boot Camp to that assigned in Parallels, then that's about the extent of it. In my case, the wireless adapter was the one that had to match, but it's possible some other adapter needs to match in your case. Of course, you've already tried all of them, so that would seem to rule out that as a problem.

The only other thing I can think of is that possible the network configuration under Parallels also needs to be of a particular type. In my case, I'm using "Shared" (which as I understand it is like having a NAT router between the Parallels Windows instance and my Mac hardware). "Local only" and "Bridged" are also possibilities, and I don't know that the technique works when using either of those settings. If you are using one of those two settings, it might be worth switching to "Shared" to see if that helps.

Pete
 
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