Windows XP Pro
Worked on a machine that wouldn’t boot up. The message it gave was “A problem is preventing windows from accurately checking the license for this computer. Error Code:0x80040017”
My first thought was a virus or malware but since I couldn’t log into the machine I managed to log into safe mode and did a system restore to about 10 days earlier, that didn’t work so I tried a different restore point and that didn’t work either so I started searching the internet and trying all the different things I found. None of that worked.
I had read some posts by people who ran chkdsk /r and it solved their problem so I tried that, found problems and corrected them still had same problem. Ran defrag and chkdsk again. Booted into windows normally and thought I had it till it gave me the blue sceen we all hate to see, tried booting into safe mode and it just froze and wouldn’t do anything. Turned it off and back on and it ran chkdsk on it’s own and found some more problems (some of which were in the restore folder) after which it still gave me the original error. Went back into safe mode and picked a different restore point again and it worked this time.
Scanned for Malware and fixed problems then did a deep scan for malware and fixed those problems.
From this point it would be a matter of making sure there are no other malware items, viruses or spyware but the machine seems to be fine now.
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