Thanks.

I think something went bad during my Win7 retail install. My system had WinXP, Win7 RC, and Linux (using Grub) on two HDD. Installing Win7 meant formatting the drive with XP and Linux, and Grub. The retail Win7 installer located Win7 RC, on the othe HDD, and installed fine. But on boot up, there was a NO BOOTMGR message.

When I used my motherboard HDD boot selection menu (F12 for me), and picked a drive, Win7 would start and offer to boot two instances of Win7 (one of which had to be the RC).

Then last night I installed the latest Ubuntu, and formatted the Win7 RC partition for that. The Ubuntu installer couldn't see Win7, nor could Grub 2. No way to boot to Win7, even with custom Grub 2 configs. Grub couldn't find a bootable partition.

So I pull the Ubuntu HDD, leaving only Win7 and on boot get a NO BOOTMGR message again.

I'm wondering if the retail Win7 installer used the Win7 RC boot sector, and when I removed it, there was no path to retail Win7.

Running the Win7 startup repair tool from the DVD fixed things. The Win7 HDD became bootable, and will boot straight to Win7. Then I hooked back up the Ubuntu HDD, ran the Ubuntu installer again, and this time it spotted Win7, offered to import accounts, and Grub 2 detected Win7 as well.

Anyway, something with my configuration prevented Win7 retail from putting a boot manager on the HDD it was installed to. Weird, but fixed.

Putting Vista/Win7 on with XP or Server 2003 (and before) can be tricky sometimes since the newer OS's don't use a boot.ini now, so things can get confused. Sometimes copying the boot.ini to each partition with an OS on it can be a quick fix.

Yesterday I set up Windows 7 Upgrade edition as a stand alone new install on a clean hard drive -- but did not activate.

Yesterday and today, I loaded all my most important applications (no games) and verified their function.

Today, I tried to activate.

It just worked the first time. No hacks required, no muss, no fuss. Took a few seconds. The blog that gave activation hack instructions said that for some people it activates right away on the first try without hacks. Good for me for a change