I just swapped out the motherboard in a customer's PC. The old board was an Intel Desktop board. The new board is an MSI G31.
This post has a concise guide on how to force msoobe to show the 'Welcome to Windows' screen. Alternatively, you could accomplish what you are aiming to do by using Sysprep. I do not believe there are any other alternatives, and a google combination search for msoobe parameters/switches turns up nothing but /a.
It booted up and let me install the motherboard drivers in Normal mode but it would not install the network drivers. It wouldn't detect any network cards, actually. They show up in Device Manager, but it says 'Cannot Start' under the device. I decided to do a Windows XP repair install. It got almost all the way done with the repair, up to the black Windows XP screen where it is running the MSOOBE. It's just sitting there. I can get into task manager through Shift-F10 and I just see the MSOOBE sitting there. There is no CPU activity, it's just stuck. Any advice? If I quit the MSOOBE, it just hangs there after I click the user's name.
To reduce piracy, Windows XP introduced product activation. Windows Activation requires Windows to activate with Microsoft (either online or over the phone) within a certain amount of time in order to continue using the operating system. The feature is still part of Windows operating system including Windows Servers too. here is few simple commands, that shows Windows Activation status.
For Windows XP/Windows Server 2003
In Run dialog box, type and execute the following command.
oobe/msoobe /a
The absolute path of executable is: X:WindowsSystem32oobemsoobe.exe
Where X: is your Windows drive and /a is command-line argument to the executable.
For Windows Vista/Windows Server 2008 or later
In StartSearch or Run dialog box, type and execute the following command.
slui
The absolute path of executable is: X:WindowsSystem32slui.exe
Where X: is your Windows drive. It also works on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2