Hi All, This is a little wierd so please bear with me. I had 2008 RC1 installed on a DL380 G4, I had installed it a few times without problems. I then installed the Hyper-V beta and logged in fine, but it wouldn't let me install the hyper-v role (no hardware vt) so I rebooted to check the bios to see if there was an option to turn VT on. There wasn't any talk of VT so I assumed the DL380 dosn't support it and rebooted into windows. When windows restarted it told me I needed to activate, so I put in my technet plus code, and tried to activate but it didn't work. I called MS to activate over the phone and they told me the key was invalid. So I rebuilt the machine (formatted the drive) as 2008 RC1 Enterprise (non HyperV) and upon reboot I get the same activation screen. So I rebuilt again, this time choosing 2008 RC1 Standard and deleted the volume and recreated, but upon reboot I still get the activation screen. I registered through the public website for a key and when I phoned MS and keyed in all the numbers I got a confirmation number, but still that dosn't work. Am I doomed to reduced functionality mode on this box forever?

Okay, so this is just weird. I deleted the hardware raid array, created a new one, started the install, created a new volume, used my technet key, unticked the box to activate automatically, finsihed the install, rebooted, set the administrator password, rebooted, logged in and again, i get the your license has expired. You need to activate. I've now used different media and a different key to produce the same result. I have installed installed 2008 many times on this hardware, and it's only happened since I went into the BIOS but I'm sure I didn't change anything, and I don't know why that would cause these issues anyway.

It turns out, when I went into the bios, I somehow reset the date to April 2006. I dont know how, but it's fixed now.

My machine BIOS date was reset during my first attempt at installing RC1. I wonder if the RC1 setup program is wacked. In my case it set it back to sometime mid-november. When I updated the date/time and rebooted it kept claiming my activation code was invalid. Grr..