Re: Swapping Laptop Hard drives

Fixer wrote:
The Dell version of Windows almost certainly won't install on the HP & vice versa. I believe they check a system makers code stored on the BIOS. You can even add memory with no problem.

That is incorrect, any OEM copy of windows will install on any machine HOWEVER if you install say a Dell copy of XP on a HP/aACer/Whatever you will need to activate windows and provide a 25 hexadecimal key. But if you install a dell copy of XP on any Dell you wont have to activate or provide a key and the same goes for other manufacturers supply of OEM Manufacturer supplied XP windows


On an Acer package I bought a couple of years ago, the restore disc supplied will *not* work except on an Acer machine, (Tried on Toshiba, IBM & HP laptops, as well as a tower unit I'd built myself) ditto with a Toshiba I've tried recently. An HP? machine I worked on a while ago actually needed the boot sector of a replacement HD "branding" (or it may have been a code burnt into the BIOS to match the HD, either way, it needed a seperate non-Windows boot CD with a downloaded program off the manufacturer's website) with a key to match the motherboard before it would even consider using it as a boot device. Once this was done, the manufacturer's restore CD set then worked to reinstall Windows. Even a full retail version of Windows (98, ME & XP tried) wouldn't install until the unit had been branded.
Dell no longer supply a restore CD with their machines, the restore partition needs to be backed up, producing a restore CD set. HP do the same. As to whether the Dell would find the HP restore partition & vice versa, I've no idea.

Going back a decade or so, a Fujitsu tablet machine I've got on the shelf needs the right external floppy drive to boot from, as it writes a special code into the boot sector of the HD. Fdisk on another machine won't produce a bootable HD for this machine, & it won't boot from either the PCMCIA slot (for CD, HD or CF card) or the USB port.

So, *any* OEM version will install on *any* machine? Not in my experience, although with 95 & 98, it was easier to work round the problems.

Possibly if you copy the I386 folder from one machine onto a fresh HD or bootable CD/DVD & use it on another machine, it may work. But then, if you're doing that, you might just as well just borrow a full copy of the appropriate OS, & use the key on the COA attached to the machine. Either way, you need to download all the drivers for the fresh installation.

--
Tciao for Now!

John.
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