Reinstall XP Home on HP system

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xpd

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#29402 6-Jan-2009 10:30

Anyone come across this... and how'd you get around it if at all....

One of our admins has dropped off her HP system for us to reinstall - no CD's supplied.
There is a HP recovery partition but require the restore CD to access it.

System has a XP Home product key/COA so I installed XP Home using one of our OEM copies here, and then thought Id just change the key to the HP one afterwards.

Cant do it. Everything comes up saying its not a valid key yet when I check on MS's site, it says its a valid key but its for XP Pro, not Home.

I could just disable the activation etc but then she wont be able to update Windows etc.

Any way to get this activated or am I stuck without the HP restore disc ?

Gavin / xpd / FastRaccoon / Geek of Coastguard New Zealand

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boby55

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#187734 6-Jan-2009 10:51

Ring HP and order the recovery disks. If windows has been formated and OEM home reinstall it will no longer have the recovery Disk creater.

Alt you could ring HP and see if they have the disk creater on the hidden partion

old3eyes

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#187756 6-Jan-2009 12:42

You ever tried to get anyone at HP NZ??

Regards,

Old3eyes

xpd

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#187761 6-Jan-2009 12:52

LOL

Ive given up trying to use the HP key for now... restored the Ghost I had from the system before I reinstalled - will see what I can do with it to get the PC running better.

Or maybe hint they should run Ubuntu if they only browse/email...... :)

Gavin / xpd / FastRaccoon / Geek of Coastguard New Zealand

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rphenix

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#187850 6-Jan-2009 18:33

boby55: Ring HP and order the recovery disks. If windows has been formated and OEM home reinstall it will no longer have the recovery Disk creater.

Alt you could ring HP and see if they have the disk creater on the hidden partion

If they are anything like Toshiba etc.. the recoveries will cost at least $75 to purchase and take a darn ice age to arrive quicker to just format, setup the system using a vanilla oem windows cd using the cd key thats on the side of the hp. Make sure you use magic jelly to load the registry hive of the pc to get any office keys just incase you need to install that as well. This is presuming the ghost image isnt good enough :) if it is just run ccleaner a few other tools to clean up the system maybe a new profile and be done with it.

rphenix

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#187851 6-Jan-2009 18:37

Also another way of accessing the recovery partition so you can restore the system is to download super grub disk with that you can select which partition you want to boot from and assign all sorts of boot arguments.

Its one of my favourite tools!

trig42

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#188519 10-Jan-2009 09:03

Is it an XP home or XP pro key?

How old is the computer? Most newer HPs access the recovery partition by pressing F11 when booting, you don't need a CD.

I have done plenty of fresh installs, however, on HPs using the COA key, just need the right OEM Windows CD - I have images of both.

xpd

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#188566 10-Jan-2009 13:58

Was a XP Home install - found how to access the recovery partition finally - need to create the disc within windows first - stupid idea, what if windows dies and you want to restore ? You cant.

Anyway, got the PC going with the Ghost image and just cleaned it up best I could, is running lot better compared to how it was when dropped off to me.

Gavin / xpd / FastRaccoon / Geek of Coastguard New Zealand

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rphenix

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#188578 10-Jan-2009 15:08

xpd: Was a XP Home install - found how to access the recovery partition finally - need to create the disc within windows first - stupid idea, what if windows dies and you want to restore ? You cant.

Toshiba has been doing that for what 5 years maybe more first part of setting up a new laptop for staff in my last job was to first create the recovery DVD's for the customer as you knew they werent going to think of that till after the machine was dead.