External hard drives and Kontakt Authorization

After the Kontakt 2.2 update, Kontakt lost its activation. Customer service assigned me another serial number and it eventually activated. I attached an external hard drive to the computer to copy over some samples and Kontakt was de-activated. It said my hardware had changed. Service center repeatedly fails to re-activate Kontakt.

Has anyone else experienced this problem? Does NI not permit external hard drives? Some of these sample collections are large and its nice to be able to move them on and off the main system when we need them.

 

You can put the sample libraries on external drives, but you should always install the Kontakt application on your boot drive so that it never moves.

 

Thanks David,

I do not have Kontakt itself or its library on the external hard drive. Just other sample sets.

Kontakt seems to think I've changed my hardware configuration and has asked me to reactivate the program. I could not get the new service center to activate Kontakt 2.2 properly.

Finally, I disconnected the external harddrive and tried to reactivate. After trying about 5 times, the program reactivated. I had to reboot then the reactivation stuck.

It doesn't seem right that a plug and play component should set off the copy protection. Given the size of new samplesets, swapping disks in some fashion is a reasonable thing to expect a sampler like Kontakt to allow.

Its such a great program!
Its no fun when its broken.

 

Damn! Weeks after updating 2.2, Service Center continues to de-activate my Kontakt 2 after I attached and then detached an external harddrive.

When Kontakt opens it has the Activate/Buy/Run Demo window and there is a small message at the top saying "Your hardware has changed!"

Anyone else having this problem? Why is the copy protection so concerned about harddrives?

 

I don't see what platform you're on and I've never had a problem with NI products but one of their competitor's products acted all kinds of effed up if the sample drive was formatted FAT32. What's the file format on your external drive?

 

I have Kontakt 2 installed on my C: drive and my K2 Library on F:. When I installed the 2.2 update I had to re-authorize although I had made no hw changes. The process went okay but I thought it strange that going from 2.1 to 2.2 would necessitate a re-authorization. This has never happened to me before on any other NI upgrades of other products.

 

We all had to reauthorize. The 2.2 update canceled all previous authorizations by design.

You are allowed to have two authorizations. If you only use K2 on one PC, why don't you create one authorization with the external drive plugged in and one without it?

 

Hehe, very clever Nickie.

However, NI states somewhere, [FAQs] I think, that external or internal drives should not constitue reauthorization.

T.S.

 

I don't see where anyone has answered your first question directly. I have added another external drive (Western Didigtal My Book 250 g) since installing Kontakt 2 (and all updates), and I have not had to re-authorize Kontakt.

 

Thanks for sharing your experiences. I'm really baffled because I seem to be able to duplicate the problem just by turning on the external drive.

Native Instruments have acknowledged they're having problems keeping up with support requests. It seems like a lot of people are reporting that they are not getting responses to their e-mail case submissions.

I can get by, but it is a drag spending an hour or two trying to get reactivated when that message reappears.

 

I totally understand. At this point, I would say you really should call NI's tech support phone number. It's such a bizarre problem and I can't think of anything that could be suggested that would fix it "from the outside" so it's important to let them know what's going on. Perhaps they know of invisible files or something that need to be deleted that would COMPLETELY reset Kontakt and enable you to authorize once permanently.

 

I had 2 yes 2 hard drive crashes that resulted in re-installations. There is an authorization maintenance page that allows you to deactivate old activations - even for the same machine.

In one of my lengthy discussions with NI tech, they actually said you can run up to 3 concurrent authorizations.

Perhaps you can go review your authorizations, remove one or more that may be there and then redo the activation process.

That's what I did and it worked fine. I also have an external drive at this point and have had no issue.