Leolo

Hi everyone, I have just repaired an Acer PC from a customer. The PC was correctly activated but it had some corrupted system files and was giving strange errors (God, why does Acer STILL use FAT32 in the 21st century???) The client had lost the original Acer recovery CD, so I copied the contents of my Windows XP SP2 Home OEM CD (the generic one, not branded by any Royalty oem) to my hard drive, deleted all four OEMBIOS files and burned it again (using a correct bootsector to make it bootable) I booted the computer with the burned CD and chose the repair option (not the recovery console). During the text phase the setup program complained that the oembios files were missing, but I just hit ESC a few times and it continued. After the first reboot, during the graphical phase of setup, it complained again about an oembios file missing. I clicked cancel a few times and thankfully it allowed me to continue. The setup finished and the computer booted up correctly. It had repaired the problems the customer was having and, best of all, the computer remained activated! I didn't have to activate it again! (I checked it with "msoobe.exe /A" to be completely sure) It seems that the setup program left the existing oembios files alone, and did not delete them. I went to the system32 folder just to be sure and confirmed that the oembios files were intact. To be honest, I didn't think it would work at all. I'm very glad that it did! Is this the expected behaviour of Windows XP? Can I expect this method to work in the future with other computer brands? Many thanks in advance, best regards.