The Misleading Error Message Strikes Again
We’ve got a stock standard Windows 2008 virtual hard drive image at work that I wanted to make some additions to and generally polish up into a decent developer image. The install media was the “Windows Server 2008 Datacenter, Enterprise and Standard (x86) – DVD (English)” ISO sourced from MSDN.
I noticed that the image had not yet been activated, so I set out to rectify the situation. Hopping into the system settings in control panel, I navigated down the the section on product key information and clicked on the link to activate windows. Unfortunately this process errored out with the following message:
Code: 0x8007232B
Description: DNS name does not exist.
I immediately checked network connectivity. Can I get to google? Yes. Can I resolve MS addresses? Yes. Hmm.
Then I happened to notice some text in the bottom right hand corner of my desktop:
Windows Server(R) 2008 Standard
Evaluation copy. Build 6002
Evaluation copy? That means that my product key is not going to be valid. So I grabbed a new product key from MSDN, entered that in and tried the activation process again. Success!
After all that I still can’t figure out what a DNS error has to do with a product key being invalid. I would have been more than happy with something along the lines of “Unable to activate due to invalid product key”. They may as well have told me that activation failed due to insufficient vegemite.
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