Creating XP MCE disc from HP Recovery Partition

[beversol]

Hi,

I'm new to this forum...I had to replace the hard drive in a client's HP Pavilion PC....ordered and received the recovery Discs from HP...tried for a week with HP's technicians to get XP MCE to install from the recovery...no go...waiting for them to send a new set of discs...don't have much hope that this will help either...

I have tried successfully to install XP Pro to the new hard drive, but the client's Product ID is for MCE.

In the meantime I have been trying to figure out how to directly install XP MCE using Nlite, the i386 files on the recovery partition, and the valid MCE Product ID printed on the sticker...

So far, my attempts have failed...can this be done? If so, what do I need to do?

Bill

[PC_LOAD_LETTER]

AFAIK you cant rebuild the mce install from a recovery partition. you might be able to rebuild the first CD if you had the entire I386 folder.

If you had the 2 XP MCE OEM CDs you could reinstall using the key on the customers COA (might have to call the WGA line though after install)

its been forever since ive reinstalled an OEM MCE machine though so my info might be out of date

[JatinBeniwal]

Rebuilding from recovery cd is not possible. yet there is possibility to activate using mce key.

[beversol]

How could I use the MCE Product ID from the sticker to install from XP Home or XP Pro CD?

Thanks.

Bill

[mikel321]

Hello, I am also new at this and have also been trying to recover an MCE system using the i386 from the HP recovery disks. (In my case, I need to restore the original software before selling the computer but my recovery disks don't recognize my computer model. Per HP I probably have a corrupted MB tattoo and need to spend $200 with an authorized service center to have it reset)

One suggestion in another forum is to create a fat32 partition, copy in the i386 directory from the recovery disk, boot into DOS, and run *:\I386\winnt. I haven't tried it yet but would be interested to hear if anyone has.