XP Install Key Question

Rocker

Rocker

Rocker

Associate
Joined
28 Nov 2005
Posts
431
Location
Scotland
I have been given an HP laptop to fix, the laptop has been reinstalled with a illegal copy of XP Pro. I am now reinstalling XP as the laptop has an genuine XP home licence.

Normally I'd just recover it from the recovery partition, but whoever dealt with it last time has deleted and formatted this partition too :(

So i'm left with no option but to reinstall windows. Now I have an XP home disk, but when I try to install it and enter the genuine XP product key stuck to the bottom of the laptop it says it is an incorrect key?

Why is this? Is it because the key is an HP key or something? Are they different?
 
It could be that the XP key on the laptop is linked with a different Service Pack version than the CD you are installing from . What version does it say on the CD and how old roughly is the laptop ? .
I have had a similar problem before when trying to install with a XP SP3 CD it wouldn't accept the key , tried again with a XP SP2 and it worked fine.
 
Could it not be that its a different version of XP (i.e Retail and OEM) i think you need to use the same version as was installed on the laptop, and as said above, could be wrong SP aslo.
 
Cheers guys, solved the problem this morning.

The disk I was using was indeed retail (which I didn't check initially).

Used an OEM disk instead and all is good.


Also after a bit of research, something which I didnt know with XP as I have never had this problem before with the keys, is that keys for SP1/2 work but you require a specific key for SP3. Therefore if you are reinstalling XP with an SP3 disk and the key is an SP2 or bellow key it wont work.
 
If I remember you can use a retail disc with a oem key, you just have to copy the contents of the disc to the hdd, find the setupp.ini file, and change the pid number to something else (search google) then burn the disc.


Not that that's any good now...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom