How to recover use of your Groove account after a hard disk failure

This article describes how to recover the use of your Groove account after a hard disk failure.

After a hard disk failure, you may be able to recover the use of your Groove account. Take the following actions, as appropriate for your situation:

• If you use a managed account in a Groove domain, contact your Groove administrator for an account backup or for a new account.
• If you use Groove on multiple computers outside a managed domain, reinstall Groove on the computer that had the failure. Do not create an account.
  
  Export your Groove account from the working computer, and then import the account to the new installation. For more information about how to do this, visit the following Microsoft Web site:
  http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/groove/HA102145051033.aspx (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/groove/HA102145051033.aspx)
  Or, see the "Using your account on another computer" topic in Groove Help.
• If you use Groove on a single computer outside a managed domain, and if you have a current account file, reinstall Groove, and then import the account file.
• If you use Groove on a single computer outside a managed domain, and if you do not have a current account file, you must create a new account. To do this, follow these steps:
  1. Reinstall Groove.
  2. When the reinstallation is completed, create a new account.
     
     Note You may create an account that has the same name and password as your old account. However, the account will not be the same account. You must be reinvited to all your workspaces, send your new contact information to other users, and add contacts to your new contact list. We recommend that you use a different name so that the new account is easy to distinguish from the old account.

Note If you are using Groove Virtual Office 3.x or Groove Workspace 2.x, and if you purchased a license for the account, you must also recover the license. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Log on to your Groove.net account by using the e-mail address and the passphrase that you used when you purchased your Groove software.
   
   To do this, visit the following Groove Networks Web site:
   https://secure.groove.net/index.asp (https://secure.groove.net/index.asp)
   If someone else purchased the license, the purchaser must follow these steps for you.
2. Click My Software to obtain the list of licenses.
3. Under the product that you want, click the Active Users link. You see a list of users who enabled the licenses.
4. Click the Revoke link next to the name of your old account. This process makes that account license available for your new account.

For more information about how to avoid this situation, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: