Soft/Hardware licensing

[Tre-Cool]

Shit title I know, but a couple of weeks ago I finally started migrating my apps to my new laptop, a few them are licensed to the hardware based on unique guid info.

So i got them licensed on the new laptop & now 2 apps are complaining the license is invalid due to hardware change. But i've made zero hardware changes.

1 app, maybe but when it's 2 different, something is suss.

Anyone else experienced this with Win 11?

[ironduke]

Just making sure I got it right..

had old laptop with some licensed software attached to old laptop.
Got new laptop, installed software and transferred license somehow to new laptop?
Now new laptop has 2 pieces of different software complaining about licenses being invalid?

Did you fire up the old laptop at all? Maybe the software calls home on a restart if you don't even use said software and saw it on 2 devices so it kicked up the invalid licensing?

[kur4o]

You likely need new license based on new laptop guid rip off. I doubt old licenses will work on new machine, even if hdd is cloned.

[Tre-Cool]

yeah, no license transfer. got new licenses issued to the new hardware. hadn't had a need to use the software in the mean time.

1 of the apps was the a2l program, so i went & checked the date of the license file and that problem is solved. the date of the license file had some how reverted to my old license key.

So i got the new license from my email & over-wrote it. The weird thing for that though is.. You have delete/rename the license file for the program to generate the request key to email in. So doesn't explain how the file name went back, since i renamed it in the first place.

[Ken]

I've been down this road too, cloned an OS onto a new drive after the original drive was becoming a problem, expecting to maintain the licenses for installed software,
only to find I either had to buy them again, or waste time reversing & bypassing,
buying them again was the cheaper option in the end, though led me down the rabbit hole of investigating why, & found that the licensing in many cases, including windows,
was dependant on the VolumeID of the hard drive.
To prove that was the case, I cloned a drive onto an exact same SSD first using this tool from Microsoft to clone the VolumeID after creating the partition using the OS install DVD,
aborted installation, then cloned the drive sector by sector using AOMEI partition assistant, and managed to maintain the licenses.
.
Also found posts online validating that.
.

VolumeID.png

[antus]

If the file had the old date, I suspect you might have muddled up the files by accident and it was the old file, and when you did it again it cleaned it up. This sort of stuff is hard for the community to help with. Licensing is usually opaque in the way it works in the first place and even the vendor is unlikely to tell anyone how they've done it. So in general vendor support is usually your best option. Having said that, its not a bad idea to use VMs for software like this. Then you can often move it around, and/or if/when the OS becomes end of life you can still keep the vm stashed away and usually run it on newer hardware. Some heavily protected apps refuse to run in a VM though, and usually details about the CPU are passed through to the VM so its still possible a device guid can change depending on the host under the vm and how it works, so it all just depends. Personally I have a very strong dislike for apps that won't run in a VM. If I pay for something I don't want it attached to one piece of hardware only, and the world moves on and PCs break or change or the OS goes EOL and they are replaced. Also with some 3rd party software its a bit of a partial security layer too. Even VM snapshots that can be reverted are nice to have incase some malware gets dropped. Depends on the software and the source how much of a worry this is.

[Ken]

Maybe the software calls home on a restart if you don't even use said software and saw it on 2 devices so it kicked up the invalid licensing?

That was my scenario, reinstalled same OS on same laptop + original OS activation files, just new drive, installed software, asked for key when 1st opened,
said I needed internet connection, connected, then claimed key was invalid when I connected.
Contacted software supplier who gave me a new key for a price, still wouldn't accept new key, in re-contacting the software supplier - he
stated that he'll have to delete/clear my profile on the activation server for the new key to work.
I'm guessing that once activated, either a registry key or hidden reference file was put somewhere for the software to check on startup as
the laptop was never connected to the net by default.

[Tre-Cool]

If the file had the old date, I suspect you might have muddled up the files by accident and it was the old file, and when you did it again it cleaned it up. This sort of stuff is hard for the community to help with. Licensing is usually opaque in the way it works in the first place and even the vendor is unlikely to tell anyone how they've done it. So in general vendor support is usually your best option. Having said that, its not a bad idea to use VMs for software like this. Then you can often move it around, and/or if/when the OS becomes end of life you can still keep the vm stashed away and usually run it on newer hardware. Some heavily protected apps refuse to run in a VM though, and usually details about the CPU are passed through to the VM so its still possible a device guid can change depending on the host under the vm and how it works, so it all just depends. Personally I have a very strong dislike for apps that won't run in a VM. If I pay for something I don't want it attached to one piece of hardware only, and the world moves on and PCs break or change or the OS goes EOL and they are replaced. Also with some 3rd party software its a bit of a partial security layer too. Even VM snapshots that can be reverted are nice to have incase some malware gets dropped. Depends on the software and the source how much of a worry this is.

I was mostly looking to see if anyone had experienced any software de-activation due to supposed hardware changes being detected. I deal with this every now & again with VM's at work.

Just found it odd that these 2 apps did it after i know i applied the new licensed files, since i used the apps for a brief bit. Starting to think it's almost done a file restore. I don't sync these particular folders to my nas, so i know that wasn't the cause of it.

I'll just blame windows 11 and move on. haha.

[antus]

We dont know what software it is, so your question is very general. Maybe its better we don't know. But the general answer has to be if you moved machines, and the licenses are machine locked, then they both found something different, as intended, and they worked as intended and it is not surprising at all.

[Tre-Cool]

nothing nefarious, A2L app that 1 of the guys on here developed & another legit (paid) ecu application.

both took license files again & went on on their merry way. Which is why im blaming some sort of file restore. Just jumped the gun thinking stupid update had fcked with my hardware identifier info.