[BriTackle]

Hi everyone. This is my first post but I have been reading the forums for a couple months now and have found them very helpful. Anyway, I have a question that I haven't been able to find an answer to. We have an older HP desktop that ran Windows XP Home Edition. The hard drive in it went bad but we would like to replace the drive and get it running again. The problem is that Hewlett Packard didn't give us an XP recovery disk because the hard drive has a hidden partition with the recovery on it and HP isnt willing to send us a disk since it is no longer under warrenty, so we don't have any way to reload XP Home on the new hard drive. My question is can I use my XP Pro recovery disk from my Dell laptop? We still have the product key for XP Home from the old computer but I'm wondering if that product key will work with XP pro. Any help would be appreciated.

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Did the original hard drive "break". What I mean... is it just that windows is corrupted or is the hard drive absolutely dead? If it's just corrupted, you should be able to start the recovery partition and it will load the machine up like the first day you got it.

My question is can I use my XP Pro recovery disk from my Dell laptop?

No can do! The configuration is totally different, not to mention the OEM.

We still have the product key for XP Home from the old computer but I'm wondering if that product key will work with XP pro.

No. Product keys are not interchangeable between the different flavors of XP.

makai

[makai]

Did the original hard drive "break". What I mean... is it just that windows is corrupted or is the hard drive absolutely dead? If it's just corrupted, you should be able to start the recovery partition and it will load the machine up like the first day you got it.

My question is can I use my XP Pro recovery disk from my Dell laptop?

No can do! The configuration is totally different, not to mention the OEM.

We still have the product key for XP Home from the old computer but I'm wondering if that product key will work with XP pro.

No. Product keys are not interchangeable between the different flavors of XP.

makai

[BriTackle]

The original hard drive physically broke and is absolutely dead so we can't use the recovery partition on that. I guess we will have to figure something else out. Thanks for the help.

[Murray S.]

Howdy and welcome to G2G:

Contact HP again and mention the Class Action Law Suit they lost.. They are being forced to supply proper restore/recovery cd's for every HP system they sold without one!!

Murray

[adanaca]

Would you happen to know if a similar Class action suit was started for Canadians?

I have a HP 533w-b pavilion running Windows XP home edition and I've had to do a system recovery on it just yesterday. Unfortunately, the recovery partition is corrupted and HP didn't provide recovery cd's.

I've contacted the legal office that is handling the US Class action and will post here their response as to how this applies to Canadians.

Phoned HP today and they want $50 to provide me with a set of recovery cd's. IF they can locate some for my model of pavilion.

Edited by adanaca, 06 August 2005 - 12:22 PM.