Unfortunately Libre Office is not where I want to go today

August 26, 2012 6:38 PM

Where can I download a legit installer for MS Office Standard Edition 2003 with volume licensing?

Got a customer machine here rootkitted badly enough to make it worth going the nuke and pave. She's old and set in her ways and I want to make the new installation look as much like the burnt one as possible, which involves reinstalling the software she actually uses. She has installation media for everything except what came with the machine, which she bought as a refurb from a dealer no longer in business.

it came with MS Office Standard Edition 2003. There's a Microsoft COA stuck to the side of the case reading

Microsoft Office 2003 Std Community MAR
MAR Program

with some barcodes and whatnot, but no product key.

I've extracted the Office product key from my backup of the old installation with Magical Jellybean Keyfinder, but it doesn't work with this Office Standard 2003 installer from download.microsoft.com. I'm pretty sure that's because the old installation is actually volume-licensed, not retail (the old installation's msocache folder contains SKU012.CAB, not SKU112.CAB).

Anybody know where I could find a link (preferably at download.microsoft.com) for the volume-licensed flavour of Office Standard 2003?

posted by flabdablet to computers & internet (10 answers total)

VLK software isn't available for public download.
posted by wongcorgi at 7:35 PM on August 26, 2012

Do I truly have no legitimate options, then?
posted by flabdablet at 8:28 PM on August 26, 2012

Memail me if you really want the installer. You can the same thing, and faster, through any torrent, though. It still sounds like this isn't appropriate. Volume licensing is not for end-user machines or for reselling. It sounds like the refurb dealer installed a volume license version when they shouldn't have.
posted by odinsdream at 8:57 PM on August 26, 2012

Thanks for the offer, though I think I'm actually OK now; the trick was looking under "Archive" in the Volume Licensing Service Center instead of under "Office". Gah.

Anybody know anything about the terms of the MAR Program? The Windows XP Professional COA stuck to the same box also mentions it, and I had no trouble doing a fresh XP install using retail media and the product key from that COA. The Office COA, as I mentioned earlier, doesn't have a product key.
posted by flabdablet at 9:09 PM on August 26, 2012

You can the same thing, and faster, through any torrent

This is a recipe for getting rootkitted again.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:30 PM on August 26, 2012

Yes and no. It's pretty easy to do a sha1 of anything you download and check it at isthisfilesafe.com or even Google it; worth doing even for stuff downloaded from legitimate sources because it will catch time-wasting download corruptions as well as deliberate vandalism.

That said, the sha1 of the installer I just got from the VLSC seems to be unknown. Checking it again now.
posted by flabdablet at 10:05 PM on August 26, 2012 [1 favorite]

If you have a MSDN subscription, I believe the following should work:

Office Standard Edition 2003 (English)
File Name: en_office_2003_std.iso
Languages: English
SHA1: ce874450d291a1af05b5f87a90814ded3a87b734
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/downloads/default.aspx#FileId=6034
posted by reptile at 5:26 AM on August 27, 2012

I don't have a MSDN subscription, but just to prove a point I Googled the SHA1 you quoted and was able to downloaded the .iso in six pieces via some dodgy-ass Vietnamese site that came up as the first search hit. After concatenating them, the SHA1 matched; so I loop-mounted the .iso and checked its contents against the unzipped .exe I'd already got via Volume Licensing.

Only present in the .iso: ZF561402.CAB, 2248811 bytes dated Aug 15 2003.
Only present in the .exe: ZF612702.CAB, 2266659 bytes dated Jan 27 2004.

STD11.XML from the .iso contains a reference to ZF561402.CAB; the corresponding lines in STD11.XML from the .exe contains a reference to ZF612702.CAB. There are also lines referring to STD11.MSI that contain different MD5 values, which makes sense as STD11.MSI is slightly different.

Everything else is file-date- and content-identical. I'm prepared to believe that both are genuine Office 2003 Standard volume licensed releases, with the .exe version being a few months more recent.

Volume Licensing's .exe version installed just fine and accepted the license key from the nuked installation, for what that's worth, so I've no need to use the illegitimately obtained one. Even so, I strongly doubt it's been tampered with. The writing is certainly on the wall for SHA1, but I think it's still fit for this purpose.
posted by flabdablet at 10:33 AM on August 27, 2012

If you know the hash is good (definitely from Microsoft) then it's probably reasonable to assume you're okay for this task.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:08 PM on August 28, 2012

The SHA1 that reptile quoted appears on the linked MSDN page, so I think it's legit. I've been unable to find any public reference to the SHA1 of the .exe version I got via the official Volume Licensing site, but since that stuff is all behind a paywall that's probably to be expected.

The VL site doesn't list hashes for the stuff customers can download from it, which strikes me as a bit slack, but the .exe passes a sigverif check and that's good enough for me.
posted by flabdablet at 11:19 PM on August 28, 2012