Specifying MAK Keys in Answer Files

If you are deploying the volume-licensed Enterprise edition of Windows Vista, your computers can be activated either using a KMS server or by specifying a MAK key. But if you want to activate Windows by specifying a MAK key, where do you specify the MAK key in your answer file? The problem is, there are two places in an answer file you can specify a product key:

1. In the Microsoft-Windows-Setup\UserData\ProductKey component, which can be added to the windowsPE configuration pass section of your answer file.
2. In the Microsoft-Windows-Shell-Setup\OOBE\ProductKey component, which can be added to the specialize configuration pass section of your answer file.

For MAK keys, you can leave the windowsPE value blank and specify your MAK key in the specialize value.

For more information on deploying Vista, see my series of articles titled Deploying Vista right here on WindowsNetworking.com.