[7point62]

Hello everybody, I'm jonathan. What a great forum - lots of good information here.

First a little background with the problem:

A Spanish friend at work has a laptop with the Spanish version of XP Pro SP3 on it. He's recently moved to the UK and wants to get an internet connection at his new place but the ISP is telling him that he needs the UK version of XP (or 2000, Vista etc...)

After a bit of a Google I thought that a repair install (after making an image of his drive in case I fubar it) with my UK Windoze would be worth a try. That way there would be least messing with docs and settings and whatnot (everything's in Spanish and I'm totally lost!)

I extracted his product key, dusted off an XP Pro SP1 disk and slipstreamed XP3 onto it. The disk booted normally but when I navigated past the EULA to the bit where drives and installed OS's are reported, Windoze didn't recognise his XP Pro install - it just reported an NTFS partition. Therefore I didn't get the option to to repair install - just a clean install (which is a bit of a last resort).

I'm stumped! Anyone had success slipstreaming an SP1 CD with SP3? (I'm thinking perhaps I need an XP Pro SP2 CD). Or has anyone tried a repair install with a Windows version from a different country of origin? Would it be worth trying to uninstall his SP3 update? [\clutching straws mode]

He's a nice guy and I'd like to help him out - what with the relocation and a new baby he's flat broke so getting the repair install to work would be sweet.

Sorry for the long post and thanks in advance.

Edited by 7point62, 24 January 2010 - 07:29 PM.

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I find it hard to believe that he can't run his system as is in the UK. I would ask some more people. Regarding slip-streaming and repair, try to avoid it if you can because you may encounter serious problems. Last: There is no gurantee that his product key will work match your XP disk.

[The Skeptic]

I find it hard to believe that he can't run his system as is in the UK. I would ask some more people. Regarding slip-streaming and repair, try to avoid it if you can because you may encounter serious problems. Last: There is no gurantee that his product key will work match your XP disk.

[7point62]

Hi and thanks for the reply.

I find it hard to believe that he can't run his system as is in the UK. I would ask some more people.

That's probably the best idea I've heard yet. Obviously language barriers get rather more impenetrable when you start trying to talk techie stuff so perhaps it's better if I contact his prospective ISP's myself to clarify.

Regarding slip-streaming and repair, try to avoid it if you can because you may encounter serious problems. Last: There is no gurantee that his product key will work match your XP disk.

True true, but as I've backed up his OS partition (twice to different locations!) then if he does need a UK OS then attempting the repair thing is still preferable to a clean install - if it doesn't work then I can just restore his original setup. I'm almost tempted to let him have one of my old boxes just so he can get an internet connection...

At the moment I'm more intrigued as to why his OS isn't being identified during the install process - I've only seen that on computers that are well and truly futzed and it usually requires replacing a corrupted system file or two, but his OS isn't broken. Anybody suggest any tweaks?

Cheers again for the reply.

[7point62]

Heh, I think I've got it sussed.

The laptop in question is an Acer and it has a hidden recovery partition. The thing is it's the primary partition and contains the boot sector (even though the Windows XP partition is labelled "C"). So that explains why there was no boot.ini etc in the root of the "C" drive...

I've unhidden the recovery partition and am making an image of it.

If it was my laptop and I was feeling super-brave then I'd install XP on the "new" partition, register it (to ensure that the extracted product key works), make sure it was dual-booting properly, then attempt to repair the original Windows install as above (all this assumes that my friend does need a UK install) thus avoiding the need for a fresh install and the woe that would ensue from trying to find all the esoteric apps that are installed on this thing.

Then a bit of tidying up - set repaired install as default, set boot.ini time to "1" and hide the partition with the new XP install (to stop it getting fubar'd). Job done! But it's not my laptop - If it doesn't work I'll have futzed the MBR and would need to restore the original recovery partition.

Sorry that I'm rambling, but hopefully some of this will prove useful to other Acer sufferers out there. Comments are welcome too!