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XP one size fits all or separate slipstreamed disk for each mfr?


MariettaMike

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If the machines have different versions of XP and different licensing schemes (thus activation methods), and depending on how many time you intend to install Windows on them in the future, you may have to check what the benefit is of building a one fit all disk. There arte methods of building a disk that will autoactivate on your Dell and your HP, but they will not auto activate on your "generic" machine, so this is already a no go for a "one fit all" solution. On the other hand, i it's all the same versions (Home or Pro), you might build a disk that can be manually activated on all machines. What do you mean by "the generic"?

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The generic is a BYOC machine from off the shelf parts. The XP Disk is straight from MS and was purchased as an item at computer store and not preinstalled.

The reason for my initial question was that recently when trying to determine a problem, I pulled a disk from the PowerSpec and attempted to use it as the boot disk a HP machine. Apparently, HP has something in the BIOS or shadow boot that will not boot a non-HP disk.

Thx

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No. :no:
Meaning that here is nothing (known) that prevents a HP machine to boot from a non-HP XP install disc.
(though I wonder what you expected to do - as repair - with a XP install disc, all you have available is Recovery Console which is a rather "limited" environment).
The booting issue must be *something else*.
However, in theory, there are no particular issue in making an AIO (All In One) disk with several versions of the "same" XP install files, each specifically targeted to a given machine, and using a "flat" directory layout and -duplicates-once (i.e. CDFS hard-links), the amount of data in the actual CD would be only slightly larger than a "single" install disc.
If you post some details on the actual HP machine and on the disc that did not boot, most probably we can try and help you solve the issue.

But wait a minute, you were talking about disk (not disc) are you meaning instead of a CD that you pulled a hard disk drive from a working machine, connected it to another machine and attempted to boot from it? :w00t:

If yes :ph34r:, the hard disk did boot, but very likely stopped dead in it's tracks with a 0x0000007b Blye Screen of Death Error.
This is normal, each hard disk installation is "hardware" specific and won't normally work on a machine using different hardware (most commonly - but not only the SATA disk controller).

BTW it is possible to "adapt" an existing install of XP on hard disk in such a way that it can be booted on another machine, but the install will be changed (and will need to be adapted/changed again to work again on the "original" machine), and will need to be activated anyway.

There are also ways to make (say on a USB stick) a "universal" install of XP, capable of booting different machines, but for troubleshooting/recovering a machine one normally uses a PE (Pre-installation Environment)which is perfectly "portable".

jaclaz

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