W
What Now
Hello and thanks for reading,
Re: Dell Vostro 1000 Laptop / XP SP2 Home
After JUST rebuilding my entire laptop system from scratch (thanks to
a rootkit, I had to wipe/reformat/reinstall the OS), I did something
stupid and disabled Userinit.exe from running, which meant the shell
wouldn't load at boot.
After trying many things (using my desktop to research, making
PEBuilder, etc...) I decided a repair using the XP CD was my only
hope. Only the Dell OEM CD that came with the laptop kept turning the
boot process over to the system as soon as it detected Windows was
installed. ARGH! It would not boot from the CD no matter what I tried.
(I was looking for that EGA DOS-style screen that asks if I want to
boot to Recovery Console or install a new Windows OS... and if you
choose the latter you get to a screen where it will allow you to
install over the last one to repair it.)
So again I get online with the desktop and find out that OEM CDs are
not like genuine MS CDs, and the OEM CD won't do anything for me but
boot me into my bad OS wth no shell, no mouse, no toolbars, no
keyboard, no way to fix the problem.
So I booted from my genuine XP CD which I bought off the shelf a few
years back when I built my desktop. (Luckily I had all the Dell
drivers backed up on a separate drive.) Okay, fine. So I install
Windows XP SP2 Home, and it comes time to enter the Product ID#. So I
dig out my Dell OEM XP CD and enter THAT number, cause that's the CD
that belongs on the Dell, and the genuine XP CD is installed on my
laptop. Only the laptop won't accept the Dell PID. It will only accept
the genuine MS XP CD PID. So NOW both my laptop and desktop have the
same PID, and I'm afraid if I use Windows Update service to install
much-needed updates, it will associate the PID with the laptop... then
when I try to update the desktop later, the MS database will already
have that PID associated with the hardware on my laptop, and it will
look like I pirated it.
So my uestion is, is there any way I can manually change the PID on
the laptop to the Dell PID?
Thanks much.
was screwed. I used my desktop to investigate what I could do to get
userinit.exe loaded again.... used PEBuilder to access the NTFS
partitions, etc. but in the end what I needed to do was a repair with
the XP CD.
Re: Dell Vostro 1000 Laptop / XP SP2 Home
After JUST rebuilding my entire laptop system from scratch (thanks to
a rootkit, I had to wipe/reformat/reinstall the OS), I did something
stupid and disabled Userinit.exe from running, which meant the shell
wouldn't load at boot.
After trying many things (using my desktop to research, making
PEBuilder, etc...) I decided a repair using the XP CD was my only
hope. Only the Dell OEM CD that came with the laptop kept turning the
boot process over to the system as soon as it detected Windows was
installed. ARGH! It would not boot from the CD no matter what I tried.
(I was looking for that EGA DOS-style screen that asks if I want to
boot to Recovery Console or install a new Windows OS... and if you
choose the latter you get to a screen where it will allow you to
install over the last one to repair it.)
So again I get online with the desktop and find out that OEM CDs are
not like genuine MS CDs, and the OEM CD won't do anything for me but
boot me into my bad OS wth no shell, no mouse, no toolbars, no
keyboard, no way to fix the problem.
So I booted from my genuine XP CD which I bought off the shelf a few
years back when I built my desktop. (Luckily I had all the Dell
drivers backed up on a separate drive.) Okay, fine. So I install
Windows XP SP2 Home, and it comes time to enter the Product ID#. So I
dig out my Dell OEM XP CD and enter THAT number, cause that's the CD
that belongs on the Dell, and the genuine XP CD is installed on my
laptop. Only the laptop won't accept the Dell PID. It will only accept
the genuine MS XP CD PID. So NOW both my laptop and desktop have the
same PID, and I'm afraid if I use Windows Update service to install
much-needed updates, it will associate the PID with the laptop... then
when I try to update the desktop later, the MS database will already
have that PID associated with the hardware on my laptop, and it will
look like I pirated it.
So my uestion is, is there any way I can manually change the PID on
the laptop to the Dell PID?
Thanks much.
was screwed. I used my desktop to investigate what I could do to get
userinit.exe loaded again.... used PEBuilder to access the NTFS
partitions, etc. but in the end what I needed to do was a repair with
the XP CD.