Windows licensing always seems to be an enigma. It is ever-evolving, hair pulling and rather fragile, quite frankly. So, it is no suprrise when even professionals trained to fix those errors get caught up in it all.

First of all, I apologize for not posting more lately. However, I’ve been spending a lot of my time, predictably, on a particular item that I will later blog about. Sometimes the best thing to do is bang out what you are working on and get it working than get distracted in other things. I hope to soon post on my efforts to get OS X Yosemite working in a virtual machine.

Back to Windows, though. I had a colleague complain that they were getting an MGADiag Validation unsupported OS error. MGADiag is, of course, Microsoft Genuine Advantage diagnostics tool which is supposed to help troubleshoot Windows validation problems. Oftentimes, it is about as clear as directions to go down the street and turn right at the maple tree, but at least it can sometimes at least point to the area where it is failing.

After some discussion, my colleague indicated that the error was occuring in Windows 8, and how unusual it was to be having these issues in a machine that was relatively new. That’s when I began to wonder whether or not there really was a problem, and, sure enough, Google had the answer.

In “MGADiag validation status error – Unsupported OS“, we read:

The MGA Diagnostic Tool is for a Windows 7 computer and not for a computer with Windows 8.1 installed..

Select the keyboard shortcut Win+X, and click Command Prompt (Admin) on the drop down menu. Type cd\ and press ENTER. Type or paste Licensingdiag.exe -report %userprofile%\desktop\report.txt -log %userprofile%\desktop\repfiles.cab and press the ENTER key….

Simply put, do not use MGADiag.exe on Windows 8, but rather use Licensingdiag.exe, which comes with the operating system.

 

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