Windows 2008 R2 Stuck after activation

[psuter]

hi all

i have a problem with a virtual guest that i've updated to windows 2008: Everything runs fine until i activate windows. after the activation it wants me to reboot and when i do that, it hangs right after the bios showing a black screen with a white steady cursor in the upper left corner. When i boot from the installation cd and recreate the master boot record it boots again, but windows is deactivated again and the whole process starts from the beginning. This is reproducible both with windows genuine activation and with some "tools" found on the net that re-do the activation. I tried it also on a fresh install of windows 2008 R2 and experienced the same problem.

The only way i have to boot the machine after activation is to disable KVM hardware virtualisation. However, this makes it very slow and i assume it will also introduce all these virtualisation problems that existed prior to the availability of hardware virtualisation.

i also tried to run the same guest on both an upgraded proxmox 2.1 and an older proxmox 1.7 installation but had the same problem there.

last but not least i tried to install a grub boot loader to use this to boot windows but same thing.. grub loads but as soon as i select my windows entry to boot it shows the white cursor in the upper left corner and freezes..

any ideas?

all other windows machines including a bunch of 2003 servers, a windows xp and windows 7 guest run just fine.

EDIT: Solution: use X56?? cpu's instead of X55?? and the problem disappears

 

[psuter]

all other windows machines including <...> and windows 7 guest run just fine.

actually i have to correct that.. with that windows 7 guest i have exactly the same problem. i thought updating the boot sector helped there, but i just realized now that it too isn't activated anymore. so it seems to be a problem related to how windows 7 and 2008 handle activation.

hope someone can help

cheers
pascal

 

[psuter]

is my question too stupid and the answer too obvious or is there seriously nobody out there who has the same problem? i could reproduce this even on different hardware.. what do you guys do to install windows 2008 r2 or windows 7?

 

[psuter]

okay, i found the source of the problem and could solve it. I'll just write it down here in case sombody else runs into the same problem like me:

it seems that the reason for this strange behaviour was the CPU generation we used. We had two Dual-Socket machines equipped with Intel X5570 CPU's. Once i replaced the cpu's with Intel X5675 the problem disappeared and we where finally able to activate the said machines. So it seems like there was some improvement over the X5570 cpu's there

kind regards
Pascal Suter

 

[snowman66]

It could be related to Intel TXT or what's the logic behind this?