DELL XP Reinstallation CD

[Masta Z]

Hi, i am new to these forums. I just had one quick question:

Okay, i have 2 Dell Computers. One is a DELL XPS Pentium 4. The Other is a Dell Dimension XPS T800R Pentium 3.
The XPS is running on XP Professional and the Dimension is running on Win98SE. My WIN98 comp has been acting up lately, and i wanna go ahead and format the whole C drive and install a new OS. I really like XP Pro, and i have the DELL XP Reinstallation CD...so my question is, can i use this CD to install XP Pro on my other computer? I don't want to try and find out that i need to activate and stuff.

Thanks in advance
-Z

 

[killians45]

I probably wouldn't Many of the newer OEM cd's are bios locked. If its just locked with a certain keyphrase in the bios, or logo like Dell you'll be fine. If it needs to recognize a bios version and the two are different it wont install. You can try, but I know Gateway has bios locks for o/s installation and last I heard Dell went the same way. I dont know what they lock it down with, though.

 

[Masta Z]

Any1 else? I heard it just needs to recognize the computer as a Dell

 

[ekÆsine]

what i would try is take out the hard disk from the other computer and put it in this Dell and restore it to the hard disk partition. than i would move the hard disk back to the other computer and do a repair on the winXP. this way you might be able to bypass the BIOS lock. i think you can download the winXP floppies from bootdisk.com to do a repair.....but i am not sure.

 

[Masta Z]

Anyone else?
Thanks for the idea ekÆsine

 

[killians45]

good idea! like I said, it may just need to know its a Dell, but its upto you if you wanna risk it... I dont think a repair will check the bios lock, so that SHOULD be okay, but again I'm not sure. I know gateway had a problem where it checked the bios version. well, when someone needed to update the bios there where MANY problems because if a install was needed, it wouldn't work because the bios would not match. not sure how that was taken care of. probably some sort of unattended installation was done. you can write a flat file put on a bootable disk that will tell how the installation is done, boot off of it and start a flat install by copying the info to the hard disk and run the winnt. but not sure what commands to use to bypass this.