Nightmare...

jhenryjhenry California's Wine Country
edited April 2007 in Science & Tech
Well, last night I tried to use HP's recovery software to restore my XP Home install into the XP MCE that came with the PC (long story). However, the boot.ini was messed up because of the Xp install so I had to edit it manually to restore access to the recovery program. Long story short, I got into recovery mode, but whenever I do a destructive recovery, it takes like 15 minutes and boots into Windows and gives me a "system not fully installed" error. I've done everything.

So, I pull out the XP Pro cd that came with my dad's dell workcenter. Turns out it is just a relabeled XP Pro cd (full). I use the restore feature on that cd and get a working desktop. However, it wants activation and my xp mce 2005 cd says my pc is invalid with the upgrade program blah blah blah.

I go into system properties and see all kinds of HP info and this and that and it is blatantely obvious that it is an HP install. So, I'm kinda stuck since I want to use this thing with my 360 working as an extender. Does anyone know what the HP cd checks for? Or, does anyone know why the destructive format recovery option keeps f***ing up? Actually, both recovery options leave me screwed.

Any ideas? This is a nightmare typical of Windows installations!

Comments

  • jhenryjhenry California's Wine Country
    edited April 2007
    I tried to install XP Pro, got to a certain point where I loaded my Intel 845G drivers for graphics, and boom, activation required and I'm stuck in an infinite loop where logging in forces me to activate, which says it's already been done and logs me out...

    I've never had any problems like this from Linux, even super alpha stuff. This is just f****ing rediculous. I'm going to see if anyone has an XP MCE 2005 OEM disc at school tomorrow I can use my OEM HP code on and see if I can get somewhere, because this plainly blows. I have a copy of XP Home but I really want to use my 360 as an extender... argh

    HP and Microshaft suck!
  • jhenryjhenry California's Wine Country
    edited April 2007
    Well, I'm officially non-bootable. Does anyone in CA have an XP MCE 2005 OEM disc (NO CODE) just the disc that they would be willing to loan out? I have the valid key from HP, I just need to install it and I don't want to pay $65 to have some local fat dude install XP and "my drivers".

    If anyone is willing to help out, PLEASE let me know!
  • ShortyShorty Manchester, UK Icrontian
    edited April 2007
    Hmm.. not sure why that wouldn't work. Have you tried just formatting the OS partition completely and then running the restore? :)
  • jhenryjhenry California's Wine Country
    edited April 2007
    I tried everything, Shorty. I ended up just nuking the restore partition along with everything else because it was obviously corrupted somehow. Windows sucks, it screwed up the drive order and installed part of Windows onto the recovery partition so it overwrote something I believe, and just screwed it all up.

    So, right now all I have is my laptop and my brother is out of a PC and my xbox has nothing to sync to.

    I have an XP Home upgrade disc, a Dell XP Pro CD, and an ME cd. Unfortunately, none are what I need, and I can't simply buy the disc from newegg since I need to buy hardware with it now that M$ clamped down on the rules and specified what you must buy :angry:

    Oh, by the way, HP doesn't have the restore CDs for the 873n anymore, so I can't buy from them or I would have already.
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited April 2007
    can't simply buy the disc from newegg since I need to buy hardware with it now that M$ clamped down on the rules and specified what you must buy
    What, are you referring to Windows XP OEM?
  • jhenryjhenry California's Wine Country
    edited April 2007
    Yeah. On the newegg site it specifies you must have recent receipts for RAM, a mobo, CPU, and an HDD.
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited April 2007
    I see - token 'hardware' like a ribbon cable or MOLEX splitter don't suffice anymore. Too bad. I've saved a ton of money through OEM OS purchases.
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