Backup Windows 7 Activation

There are many ways to backup Windows 7 using third-party softwares. In this article, you will be shown how to backup and install only the activation files needed to reactivate Windows 7 when you reinstall your Windows 7 without connecting to the Internet and reactivate it. This way is beneficial because Microsoft lets you activate your Windows only ten times through the Internet. After ten times of activation, you may have to call Microsoft customer service to get the activation key. In the other word, backing up only the activation files takes less hard disk space than backing up the whole Operating System. In my experience, backing up and restoring the whole Operating System may be easier and takes less time to work. However, after restoring the operating System, it may not work well as you expect. This is because there were some errors or files corrupted during the backing up and restoring process. That is the reason why I am writing this article for.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

In this article, I will discuss mainly about how to backup and restore the activation files in Windows 7 64-Bit Operating System, and it also includes Windows 7 32-Bit as well.

There are three files that contain the activation information in Windows 7 64-Bit, the tokens.dat and two pkeyconfig.xrm-ms files. By default, the tokens.dat file located in C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\NetworkService\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\SoftwareProtectionPlatform\ and the other two files, pkeyconfig.xrm-ms, are located in C:\Windows\System32\spp\tokens\pkeyconfig\ and C:\Windows\SysWOW64\spp\tokens\pkeyconfig\. Next two sections you will shown the commands needed to backup and restore these files. In order to be able to that, you need to have the Administrator right user account.

BACKING UP THE ACTIVATION FILES

In this section, we will create a bat file that contain the copy command to backup the activation files to a folder.

• First, create a folder in C:\ directory and name it Backup_and_Restore.
• Open Notepad and type or copy the following scrips into Notepad.

@echo off
copy %WinDir%\ServiceProfiles\NetworkService\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\SoftwareProtectionPlatform\tokens.dat C:\Backup_and_Restore\
copy %WinDir%\System32\spp\tokens\pkeyconfig\pkeyconfig.xrm-ms C:\Backup_and_Restore\
copy %WinDir%\SysWOW64\spp\tokens\pkeyconfig\pkeyconfig.xrm-ms C:\Backup_and_Restore\pkeyconfig64.xrm-ms
pause
exit

• Save the scripts by pressing Ctrl+S key. Name the file Backup.bat and save it to the Backup_and_Restore that we just created.
• Open the Backup_and_Restore folder, and right-click on the Backup.bat file, and then select Run as Administrator.
• Click Yes button when a small Windows prompted.
• Now you should see three more files added to the Backup_and_Restore folder.

That's all what you need to backup the activation files of your Windows 7 64-Bit, so save this folder in a save place. When you reformat and reinstall your Windows 7 and you will need the backup files to reactivate your Windows.

The following section is the guideline to restore or reactivate your Windows 7.

RESTORING THE ACTIVATION FILES

Here is a list of equipment and hardware Requirement for this lab:

• A wireless router - this could be any wireless router that supported WEP security encryption.
• A BackTrack 3 Live CD
• 2 wireless adapters - one of them should be a compatible wireless adapter.
• At least 2 PCs