Although floppy diskettes are now obsolete and has become a thing of the past, they can be quite useful when Windows 7 or Windows Vista need to be activated. Floppy diskettes can only hold 1.44 MB of data, but that's enough for holding tools necessary for Windows activation. The floppy will contain MS-DOS system files, GRUB4DOS and tools to soft-mod the BIOS. Unfortunately, new and recent computers don't have floppy drives. Still, we can work around without a floppy if we use a USB flash drive or a bootloader, such as syslinux. Get the floppy image here.
The bootable floppy runs a small program that artificially inserts OEM SLIC signature into BIOS for the purpose of Windows activation before booting into Windows. There are 3 utilities included in the floppy.
- loadslic.exe
- softmod.exe
- grub.exe
Loadslic and softmod do the same job of loading SLIC into BIOS. Softmod loads a file named SLIC.BIN into BIOS, but loadslic contains a SLIC code in itself. If you want to change the OEM SLIC loaded by loadslic, you have to hack the loadslic binary with a hex editor. The AUTOEXEC.BAT file by default runs softmod, but you can edit AUTOEXEC.BAT to have it run loadslic. The following is AUTOEXEC.BAT contents:
@ECHO OFF SOFTMOD GRUB
Get the SLIC file for your computer and save it as SLIC.BIN. Then, create an empty file named WIN7 in C:\BOOT folder. This file is used to tell GRUB which partition you want to boot. The following is MENU.LST contents that Grub uses to find and boot Windows.
timeout 0 default 0 fallback 0 hiddenmenu title Windows 7 find --set-root /boot/win7 chainloader /bootmgr
Finally, write the floppy image to a floppy with Winimage and restart the computer. If you don't have a floppy, use another bootloader, such as syslinux, to boot from the floppy image. Once you get into Windows, use slmgr to activate Windows.
slmgr -ilc oemcert.xrm-ms slmgr -ipk XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX
