Office 2010 Pro Re-Activation Issue

MisterEd said:

I just reread the OP's first post in this thread. I have a feeling that the OP booted the HDD and saw that Office was activated on it before the problems started. Doing that was enough to cause Office on the SSD to no longer be activated. In other words he confused the activation servers. The activation server saw two activations at the same time which is not allowed. Of course this is speculation but it would explain the problem.

Thinking about it now what he should have done is uninstall Office on the HDD. That way he would free up Office to be activated on the SSD again. Once Office is uninstalled from the HDD and he still had a problem with the SSD Microsoft might be more cooperative about helping him.

In fact there is absolutely no reason to leave Office on the HDD. As long as he has the Product Key he can reinstall it any time. He also needs to keep a copy of the install media which everyone should do anyways.

Like I said in the previous post once you clone a drive then you should consider all activations invalid on the original drive. Otherwise you might cause problems like the OP did.

Still not quite correct.

1. The HDD had been off-line for years. No, I did not boot the HDD before the problem started.

2. I was only using Office on the SSD and it was working fine for years.

3. I added RAM to the computer and immediately on opening a Word Doc or Excel Spreadsheet, I got a message that MS had detected a hardware change and the product needed to be activated.

4. Again, the HDD was not in use or active.

5. After several calls to MS and their attempts to reactive, they ask to confirm the 5 x 5 Product Code. At that point they said it was counterfeit. There were no attempts to run the HDD at the same time or to confuse the servers. The only active disk was the SSD.

6. After MS requested I send the original media, box, inserts, etc. I remembered that I still had the HDD --- it was only then that I powered it up (yes, it had been unplugged for years), booted and realized that Office worked just fine and was "active."

7. Yes, I should have kept a copy of the original media - but basically, there was nothing wrong with the installation of Office on the SSD --- it was just no longer considered "active."

8. And even now, any attempt to activate it (on-line or phone codes) fails with what they say is a counterfeit Product Code.

9. No one is trying to "have their cake and eat it, too." I don't want to run two copies of the same product. And, I have no idea why adding RAM (memory) would be considered enough to make Office go from being "active" to "inactive." That makes no sense -- its not the OS, etc. And since the SSD was working, I can't see that its the Drive ID that would make MS think there was a change in hardware.

10. So, it appears that I cannot reinstall any time with the current Product Key, even if I had kept the media. Even uninstalling from the HDD will not allow an activation. And MS Tech was not going to issue a different Product Code.

11. If I had to guess, I would say that over the years, someone else used the Product Code (maybe took it off a junk machine, etc. or MS entered what they considered invalid codes into their system (and maybe mine was not valid originally, but it worked after my initial purchase) and now when the Techs checked the system, its considered "counterfeit"....... so, I wait and wait with that lovely red banner across the top of my documents.

Thank you all for the help, especially for Martin to see what I was trying to communicate.

T J said:

My new 2012 Dell desktop came with MS Office Starter 2010 pre-installed. Recently the original 1tb hard drive completely died; I installed similar NEW SATA 1tb hd, did a MR7 image restore, and new hard drive is running Windows 10 20H2 / MS Office Starter 2010 great. There is no way to uninstall anything from the old dead hard drive, and MS Office Starter 2010 can only be installed by OEMs.

My Dell did receive MS Office 2010 Security Updates on 2/3/21, 3/9/21, and 4/13/21. Guess I'll find out this year if my Office Starter 2010 gets any memos from MS (about being on 2 hard drives: 1 dead hd & 1 NEW hd); so far so good.

Do you have the installer program for MS Office Starter 2010? If you do you can reinstall it anytime.

For a period of time about when MS Office Starter 2010 was being put on computers you could run the installer program for it and reinstall it. The MS Office Starter 2010 installer was called setupconsumerc2rolw.exe. At some point the installer stopped working. I just found out why and a workaround that allowed the installer to work again.

I tested this on an old computer I have. It worked allowing me to install MS Office Starter 2010 on it.

The following is for Windows 7

1. Open Control Panel
2. Open Network and Internet
3. Open Network Connections
4. Right-click on Network Connection and select Properties
5. Unselect TCP/IPv6
6. Select OK
7. Run setupconsumerc2rolw.exe
8. Redo steps 1 to 4
9. Reselect TCP/IPv6
10. Select OK

Thanks for the info, MisterEd.

As long as people are mentioning alternatives FreeOffice is another one

It includes:

• TextMaker
• PlanMaker
• Presentations

It does not include a database program but when I tried it I found the look and feel closer to Microsoft Office than either OpenOffice or LibreOffice.