PM said:
A friend passed on a laptop to my daughter. had a legal OEM XP home edition
originally. Some "helpful" person has installed an illegal XP Pro edition. i
want to revert to legal XP Home edition (I have disk). Problem is DVD drive
is not working.
Is there any way to change the registration key to the home edition key
without a re-install. If a reinstall is necessary can I do it a) through a
DVD drive on another machine through my home network or b) can I copy the
disk onto a USB memory stick and boot from there to install?
Maybe someone else can answer the registration key question.
I wouldn't expect it to work, but you never know.
*******
These are the steps I'd follow.
1) Use a key finder, to record what key was used on the illegal WinXP software.
Just for future reference, if you ever want to research whether it was
a volume license key, or a flat out hacked version of WinXP or whatever.
This step is optional. I don't know what the deal is here, with the
different versions. Some people start reinstalls on their computer,
without recording what was used for the previous one, and then discover
they don't know the product key.
http://www.majorgeeks.com/Magical_Jelly_Bean_Keyfinder_d2612.html
http://sourceforge.net/projects/keyfinder/
http://magicaljellybean.com/keyfinder/
2) Transfer the i386 folder from the legit WinXP home CD,
to the hard drive on the laptop. I assume this will involve
a network connection. Or even using the USB flash stick to transfer
the stuff over. There are about 5000 files in that folder.
When I did a DOS style install, I used two partitions, C:
and D:, and D: ended up with the i386 folder on it. I presume
it would work on C: just as well. (Otherwise, you'd need to
mess with partitioning the laptop hard drive.)
3) Prepare a USB flash stick with MSDOS to boot the laptop.
The recipe varies, depending on what kind of partition C:
is currently (FAT32 or NTFS).
4) Erase the existing WinXP, to avoid the "I've got two WinXPs
on the same disk" problem. I presume you can do some "del"
commands while booted from DOS, but I haven't verified that.
(When I tried the winnt.exe trick, I was doing a new install
to an empty partition.)
5) Execute winnt.exe from the i386 folder you copied, while
in DOS, to start the install.
*******
MSDOS normally only knows how to access something like FAT32.
But this package can prepare a boot floppy, with a copy of
NTFS4DOS included on it. (I haven't tested, whether just
some of the files can be copied from this program, to make
some other MSDOS floppy handle NTFS. The package seems to
include a set of DOS files, so I assume it is complete
and ready to go.) You can prepare this on some other computer.
http://www.free-av.com/en/tools/11/avira_ntfs4dos_personal.html
Now, you're probably asking "what am I going to do with a
floppy, on the laptop?". Well, you can't use it directly.
But I discovered, quite by accident, that a DOS floppy, copied
sector by sector, to a USB stick, boots *my* computer. The
nature of USB flash booting is, no two people have the same
experience. For example, the HP Formatter didn't work for me,
when it works for others. (And at least one version of the
HP formatter I've got here, has FreeDOS included with it.)
And yet, copying 1440K bytes of data from a MSDOS floppy
to an 8GB flash stick, boots fine. The file system registers
as "FAT", and the size seen by an OS, varies depending on
how you're looking at the stick (either 1440K or 8GB). This means
there is no large amount of space left to carry the whole CD
with you. (The flash stick behaves like a floppy, with respect
to capacity when you copy files to it.)
So, you can try copying the Avira floppy, to a USB stick, sector
by sector. The Windows port of "dd" copies things sector by sector.
http://www.chrysocome.net/dd
The "dd.exe" program runs in a command window. The first thing
you run, is
dd --list
to get the names of all the storage devices. Now, one little bug
I just discovered, is the program hangs while doing the "--list"
if there is a floppy in the floppy drive. Removing the floppy
from the drive, allows the command to complete. And at least
with the floppy not present, I can get the names of the devices.
I see
\\?\Device\Floppy0
\\?\Device\Harddisk2\Partition0
link to \\?\Device\Harddisk2\DR10
Removable media other than floppy. Block size = 512
size is 8019509248 bytes (this is my 8GB flash stick)
Partition0 means treating the whole storage device. Partition1
through PartitionN refers to any separate partitions on the stick.
So we don't want those. We want to overwrite the whole flash stick.
In the command prompt window (assuming you're CD'ed
[changed directories] to where dd.exe is sitting)
dd if=\\?\Device\Floppy0 of=\\?\Device\Harddisk2\Partition0
will copy the floppy to the USB flash stick (known as Harddisk2
in my case), starting at sector 0 of the flash. The command
returns the cryptic
2880+0 records in
2880+0 records out
which is 2880*512 bytes or 1440K bytes, the size of a floppy.
The transfer goes much faster, if I do this in the command window.
dd if=\\?\Device\Floppy0 of=\\?\Device\Harddisk2\Partition0 bs=32768 count=45
as that requests data from the floppy in 32KB chunks. Then the command
will report that 45 chunks have been transferred. I think this might
have been three times faster.
Now that the USB flash is loaded with MSDOS, you can try booting it.
The Avira tool will put a prompt on the screen, asking you to
confirm you are using the tool for personal usage. And after that,
I assume you'll have access to an NTFS volume. You can try this
in the command window.
dir c:\
where c: might be your NTFS hard drive partition. If the partition
was not NTFS, but was FAT32, then you could skip the Avira MSDOS
thing, and use a boot disk from bootdisk.com . Or even
investigate the HP Formatter - I think it might work if the
flash stick is smaller than 2GB. I may have got it to work
on my 1GB flash stick for example.
(There are several versions of the HP Formatter, and this
one is actually part of a firmware updater. But a small part
of it, includes the HP Formatter. The program HPUSBFW.EXE ends
up stored in C:\drivekey. This is the bookmark I've got.
Try a flash stick smaller than 2GB, as the formatter is
likely using a FAT file system.)
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsuppor...ion.jsp?lang=en&cc=US&swItem=MTX-UNITY-I23839
Next step, would be copying the i386 folder, from the CD
on the other computer, over to the laptop. You could continue to
do that, with your illegal WinXP software.
I don't know the easiest way to erase the existing WinXP.
You shouldn't be able to do that while still in WinXP, so
that won't work. That leaves doing it while in DOS.
Now comes the install part. Boot DOS from the USB flash on
the laptop. If the laptop has a boot menu (sometimes accessed
by pressing F8 or F11 when the BIOS starts), you may be able to
select the USB flash from there. Then, after the boot finishes
and you're in the MSDOS window, change to the C: drive or
whatever partition has the i386 folder.
c:
cd i386
winnt.exe
and then the installation should start.
Now, if the laptop needed a driver to access the hard drive,
well that would just suck... This is already hard enough.
So that is how "McGyver" would install WinXP
Good luck,
Paul
