Thunderbolt disk connection breaks Office 2011 licensing

Question

Thunderbolt disk connection breaks Office 2011 licensing

I have a MBP 2011 running Lion 10.7.1. This morning my LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt arrived and I plugged it in to my MBP. When I opened Excel I was asked for the product licence key for Office 2011. I have had this problem of being asked for the product key a few times since I got the MBP. This time despite entering the product key I got an error saying that the product key had been used too many times. I called MS and was provided with a new product key. All seemed OK, until I shut down the machine and unplugged the Thunderbolt drive and rebooted the machine. I was asked for the product key again. I plugged the Thunderbolt disk back in and Office worked normally. I tried this a number of times and each time had the same result. The Thunderbolt connected hard drive is clearly breaking the office licensing system in some way.

Has anyone else seen this issue. If it is common then it is a pretty major bug. I will call MS tomorrow to see if I can get any resolution.

Also is it OK to eject Thunderbolt drives in the same way as FW and USB drives? I ask as after the third time I did it I got a kernel panic that appears to have been caused by the Apple Raid driver. ( The LaCie Little Big disk uses two RAID 0 drives ).

Mac Book Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.1)

Posted on Sep 28, 2011 5:34 AM

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Answer 1

Dec 22, 2011 9:23 AM in response to gadget_aussie_man

As for disconnecting your Thunderbolt drive (I have the same drive on my 17" MBP) you should be OK if you eject it and wait for it to disappear from the Finder window. If Time Machine is running a backup on it you may want to be sure a backup is not in progress but I doubt that would happen if it correctly ejected.

As for the issue of Office 2011 licensing this is a major fail on the part of Microsoft! Whoever designed that software apparently made the incredibly foolish decision of tying to the licensing to the hardware configuration in such a way that it also includes externally attached drives. Below is a quote on a similar issue related to using eSATA connected RAID 5 drives. An unsupported configuration? This is a completely arrogant and irresponsible excuse on the part of Microsoft. What they heck are they doing tying licensing enforcement to hardware configurations that can change on a regular basis? Are they foolish enough to think that they have anticipated all possible future hardware configurations?

You have connected the external 4 drive unit in a RAID 5 configuration on eSATA. This is an unsupported configuration by Office for Mac. The workaround is to use Firewire 800 instead of eSATA

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Answer 2

Jan 10, 2014 6:01 AM in response to gadget_aussie_man

I just started having a similar problem after installing an eSata card and an external eSata drive. My eSata drive has been having an issue of disconnecting when my computer goes to sleep, although it reconnects instantly when the computer (macPro) wakes. About two days after installing my Office started asking me for my Product License key. I entered a new one but it lost it about a day later. This issue also appears to have started messing with my License of OnePassword as well.

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