Building Royalty OEM CD without the original image

[SiD the Turtle]

Hi guys,

We have a bunch of old Compaq desktops that have reached the end of their life and so we're wiping their HDDs, installing Windows XP and then giving them away. The plan was to install Windows XP and use the CD keys stuck to the machines rather than build them using our volume license keys (which obviously is not a very good idea).

On the forums here I have seen a few posts that point to how build a script to build the required files to turn a normal install CD into a royalty OEM one, however this requires me to have the original OEM image to extract from. This I don't have! Is there a way to get around this?

Thanks,

SiD

[infiniti25]

I read post similar to this over a year ago and there were some suggestions that you might want to cover yourself legally.

Think it stems from transfer of ownership for company assets and doing it properly. Obviously you are going to do what you are going to do, but just thought i'd note this down for your information.

[TheReasonIFail]

SiD,

I've just built myself a Royalty OEM XP disc w/ SP3 for all the OEM PC's we have (Dell, IBM, and Compaq/HP)

The Compaq OEM discs aren't built like the others so it took me quite a while to figure it out, but here is how I created it.

Basically what I did was grab the following files from an existing Compaq PC with the OEM install. I think all the files are in %WINDIR%\System32

- All OEMBIOS files

PIDGEN.DLL

DPCDLL.DLL

SETUPP.INI - You can grab the setupp.ini file from any other OEM disc

And you can find the OEM key from an existing install using jellybean keyfinder.

Just copy a basic WinXP install disc to your desktop, copy the uncompress files onto the disc (make sure you delete the compressed files) and you should be good to go!

Edited December 23, 2008 by TheReasonIFail