Copying Prohibited message after upgrade to Win 7

[Rgc101]

Hi - I think I know the answer to this, but I hope I am wrong. I have an old dell xps420 with vista and an ati digital cable tuner. great library of movies recorded off of premium tv that my family and I have enjoyed for years. We recently had a power outage which fried vista on my machine (BSOD). Only option was to reinstall vista from the original disk which went fine until it tried to update. kept hanging at the reboot, and could not update at all. After trying several solutions and being frustrated with vista for years, i decided to upgrade to win 7. That went well at first. Got the tuner working with premiums. When I went to play the recorded shows I already had, I got the Copying prohibited message, event though no hardware changes. I tried to rename the DRM folder. That didnt work. Does anyone know of a solution or are all of those shows toast?
Thanks for your help.

[Crash2009]

This won't do anything to save the day for you, but it might help to know what is salvageable. Turn on file details/protected to see if they are "all" protected. Try them all too, sometimes they will still play even though they are protected.

[Rgc101]

Thanks. I think i can also tell by what channel it was recorded on. Premium recordings will be dead. This sucks.

[blueiedgod]

As I answered on AVS, you have a legitimate case where you can download replacements from the torrents. I will probably get crucified for this

[Rgc101]

How about if I go back to original Vista install and try that again with OEM disk? Think that will work?

[oakley516]

How about if I go back to original Vista install and try that again with OEM disk? Think that will work?

Sounds like that was tried already:

Only option was to reinstall vista from the original disk which went fine until it tried to update. kept hanging at the reboot, and could not update at all.

The shows that were lost may be available on-demand depending on the network they're from.

[richard1980]

The upgrade to W7 isn't the issue. You performed a clean install of Vista. A clean install means you lose all of the data on the drive/partition...which means you lost the DRM keys for your protected recordings. The only way to play your protected recordings is if you were to restore a system image from before the system broke, and even then you would only be able to play the recordings that existed at the time the image was created (the keys for all of the recordings that occurred after the image was created are not in the image.)

[Rgc101]

I am now facing a similar issue with another PC - my brother's. He has a library of recordings from premium channels recorded from the media center. The PC is running vista and is almost unusable at this point. Incredibly slow and lagging. I mentioned that installing windows 7 on my old vista machine made a big difference. Can he UPGRADE to win7 and still be able to play all of his recordings? There is an upgrade icon on his desktop. He doesn't want to do it if he will lose all his premium recordings.

[evilgoat]

Dont ask me how but I beleive the key store can be exported, if this works with VIsta it may be of help :

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/wind ... =windows-7

[richard1980]

An in-place upgrade preserves the DRM keys, so any protected recordings made under Vista will be playable in W7.

evilgoat, you posted a link that discusses WMP, not WMC. WMP DRM is entirely different from WMC DRM. The file that contains the DRM keys for WMC can be backed up and restored, but only to the same OS instance. You can't back up keys from Vista, clean install W7, and then restore the file that contains the keys.