I just had to replace my motherboard yesterday March 28th…
I used my Waves plugins 2 days prior to changing my motherboard…
I did not need to reinstall my OS only swap all of the components: Hard Drives, CPU, Ram and my PCIe cards.
All went smooth, i went to load the same session mentioned above and all of my licenses save a handful do not show as registered and now i have 25 plugins i cannot use until December 2021?
Tell me Im doing something wrong here.
Makes no sense, I now have sessions that are no good as is because of this!
Central locates Waves licenses and recognizes computers by their Network Interface Card’s (NIC) MAC address. If the motherboard was replaced and the licenses were not deactivated prior to that - they remain activated to the old network adapter’s MAC address, found on the old motherboard.
The License Recovery option is provided to the user for cases, when the device holding the licenses is lost, stolen or damaged beyond repair.
Therefore the license recovery option is provided only once-a-year per license.
If you have already used the license recovery option prior to the motherboard replacement, make sure to contact our Tech Support department to check your further options in this case. They will be more than happy to assist you.
I’ve found from experience, often the hard way, that it always pays to deactivate your licenses prior to a major hardwire change, such as changing the motherboard. I would argue the network adapter card too, since its often used by licensing mechanisms to help identify your device, as also seems to be evident here.
Fortunately, in the case of Waves, it only takes a few seconds to jump onto Central and transfer your license back to the cloud. Other software might not be so easy to contend with as you may have to go through them one by one to deactivate.
None of this helps you now, of course, but it may help out in the future.
If you by any chance find out the MAC address of your old motherboard then you could apply this to your current system.
I’m not sure if the licenses will reappear then, but if it’s only the MAC address then this could work.
