And I have machines here that won't boot from an XP disk.
They work just fine with various Linux distros, though, including (to my own surprise) the latest Ubuntu experimental release (9.04).

And when the installers actually work as designed, the XP one really sucks for hardware support.

Big deal.

EDIT: And what's all of that got to do with this thread, anyway? Remember.. it's all about a multi-day effort to re-install XP on a machine where it once had been working, apparently. And is no longer, and appears to be unlikely to again. Unless a huge amount of money is paid out for permission to do so once again.

Thus the suggestion of a quite reasonable alternative to spending one's way out of a sticky mess.

Cheers

A dead hard drive doesn't give a crap what operating system you run.

And yes, if they were using Linux they wouldn't have to pay to get back up and running. They also wouldn't have had to pay if they'd kept around the original CD and the key for the OS.

I work with the average consumer almost every day to make my living, and I can't think of an argument that could get me to believe that they are capable of using the operating system long-term.

Ubuntu works better than you might think, but that doesn't really make any difference. If you took your car to the mechanic and got it back with a different transmission, even if it was free, even if the mechanic thought it was better, you'd be pissed.

Sure thing. So basically, you are screwed. The transmission is completely shot, and an identical replacement cannot be purchased. So your options here are now to (1) tell them to buy a new car, or (2) accept a no-cost third-party transmission for the old one. Oh, or give "it back with a different [$200] slower transmission (Vista)" in place of the original one (see above).

Note that the no-cost replacement is still a good thing in either case, as otherwise the machine goes to landfill.

Cheers

An identical replacement can be purchased. The issue is whether the car is worth replacing the whole transmission, and whether I can get the much cheaper part to repair the existing transmission. (This metaphor is getting tortured.)

But it looks like I can get the replacement part, free of charge, so, problem solved. Knock on wood.

And I'm sure there will be more and more of them as XP gets older and older. Which we all know is a different situation to my surprise that Ubuntu still haven't resolved serious known problems with booting the live CD on a whole bunch of common hardware despite having 18 months to do so.

What exactly do you mean by that, 9.04 is their latest mainstream release isn't it ?

The idea that a LiveCD, which works fine on the genuine hardware, won't boot inside a proprietary VM application.. suggests to me that the VM app has a bug or ten.

Now if it were something more mainstream, mature, and third/neutral-party, like VMware failing here, then yeah, I'd agree: bad LiveCD.

Kinda like the issue I was having (until throwing in the towel) trying to get a working XP install to boot inside VMware. You'd really think they'd test that kind of scenario.

That said -- the Ubuntu LiveCDs often do choose peculiar video modes for startup, in an attempt to be font-friendly to the planet. Rather than making language-specific LiveCDs for each of the dozens of supported languages/charsets.

-ml

Do generic manufacturers like Dell still ship CDs for free? I've seen a couple of Dell machines in the past few years (one I purchased and two of friends) that didn't have CDs. They did have some type of restore partition or some-such on the HD, but if you borked your drive, you were done.

Small Biz accounts can ask for the CDs after the sale, and they arrive by FedEx the next day, no charge. Or at least that's how it has worked the last few times around for us. (Note that those CDs are still in the shrink wrap in a box somewhere here, for if/when we discard the machines at EOL)

Non-Biz customers get dinged with threats of a fee for the same service. Some machines can be configured with the discs for extra $$ at purchase time, too.

EDIT: Oh, and there's a way to burn a single OS disc from the recovery partition contents now, too. That's Dell's preferred way of doing it.

Cheers

Depends on the model. For the professional grade machines they do. For the consumer-grade machines, I have no idea. However, I'm certain that if your hard drive failed under warranty that they'd send a recovery CD in addition to the hard drive. Getting that CD without a warranty, though, I'm not sure.

Many manufacturers have a utility for you to burn your own recovery CD set from the OS, which they suggest you do first thing. I suppose that saves them 8¢ a system.

The last three machines I bought from Dell (over the last 12 months) all still came with recovery CDs. Two were very much consumer aimed machines, one was a "business class" laptop.

The Dell Mini 9 ships with a recovery CD, but doesn't ship with a CD drive...

Mark, what was the issue you were having with installing XP in a VM?

If it was anything like my issues I had installing XP in a VM, it was probably the device drivers for the hard disk. You have to do the thing where you press S during install and supply it with a third party floppy disc image. Only problem is, I tried that, and it still didn't work.

I'm surprised that you've had trouble getting XP to work. Its always worked fine for me with no problems at all. It is just as hard to install XP to a SCSI HD. VMware emulates IDE in Server & Workstation so you don't even need a driver. ESX 4.0 does IDE now as well but the driver disk always worked fine if you used the SCSI emulation.

Booting, not installing:

Hung at boot time on Mup.sys, when booting the VM from a real-life partition. I've abandoned the effort now, so don't waste any grey cells on it -- I found a Linux program that does what the corp. machine usually did only under XP.

Cheers

That's more or less the model every mfgr is going to. Certainly the last four machines I've purchased did it that way.

So did you get your problem fixed, Bitt? I assume the replacement CD would pretty much take care of it all.

I have a somewhat related question, too: I recently had wipe my main computer (pretty bad viruses). Sadly I was too dumb to check if my WinXP case had the discs still in it.

So now I have a case with a product code (and the second disc with service pack 2 on it) but no disc. I don't suppose it's possible to get a replacement from Microsoft, is it? This was an OEM copy I bought through Newegg...

I figure this is a pretty dumb question, but I thought I'd ask just in case

Microsoft has a downloadable copy of XP on MSDN. See here for information.

I got past the license key part of the installation, but I'm still arguing with it.

First, I have to point out how … odd the recovery was. It came on two CDs which appear to be CD-Rs that had the labels silkscreened on by hand. It booted into Windows98 command prompt mode and loaded a DOS CD driver in order to … I'm not totally sure; format the hard drive, maybe? Then it rebooted itself and proceeded to copy the XP installation to C:\i386 by extracting what must have been fifty ZIP files. Then it rebooted again into the normal Windows XP installation which they had somehow scripted. Then it booted into XP where it automatically installed a bunch of IBM-specific software. It rebooted several times while doing this. Finally it ran sysprep on itself and rebooted again, where I finally got to interact with the OS. This all took about 45 minutes.

Then once it was installed, it was XP SP0. No service pack at all. You know how XP service packs are supposed to be all-inclusive, so that you don't need to install intermediate service packs? Like Microsoft says: "SP3 includes all previously released Windows XP updates, including security updates, hotfixes, and select out-of-band releases." Of course, it then goes on to say "To install SP3, either Windows XP Service Pack 1a (SP1a) or Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) must already be installed." I don't think the folks over at Microsoft really understand that "all previously released" means. So I got to install SP2, then SP3. Each one of those took probably half an hour.

Then onto the post-SP3 updates, of which there are dozens. Those took another hour or so. (Remember that this is a P3M with 128MB of RAM. If I had a PC133 SODIMM lying around, I'd give it to her.)

Then I realized that the recovery CD had formatted the new 150GB hard drive into a 30GB partition. So I had to go download a filesystem resizer. (EASEUS is free for home use and works pretty well, BTW.)

All of this, BTW, was while its ethernet was hooked up to my MacBook because the WiFi card doesn't support anything beyond WEP. Not that I'm sure that's relevant anyway; I can't even get it to see the half dozen networks available around here. I think it's broken somehow. Haven't figured that one out yet. I did manage to completely screw up the OS while trying to fix it, though, so I got to recover again. That was another three or four hours.

Internet Explorer occasionally forgets how to make network connections, which makes downloading stuff fun.

The IBM software update utility that came with the system no longer works, and the one that replaced it no longer works, either. And IBM/Lenovo gives you a matrix for the specific model, but there are enough variations of the model that it can be hard to figure out which hardware you have, what you need to download, and what is already installed. Add onto that that the downloads are named descriptive things like "7avu43ww.exe" and don't actually install anything, but merely extract themselves to such unique directories as "C:\DRIVERS\WIN", and getting updates is just a nightmare.

So I'm still arguing with it. And I haven't even gotten to restoring data yet.

Thanks for the tip! The only thing that worries me (and that I neglected to mention in my post) was that I have XP MCE. Do you know if they have that available as well?

MSDN has XP MCE 2005, nothing newer.

Be warned that the link provided does not have links to the direct MSDN downloads, but rather torrents off a torrent site. I personally wouldn't trust an OS downloaded from a torrent site, since spyware could also be slipstreamed in.

Actually, I only linked there because I thought the MSDN ISO download page was behind a password. Turns out it isn't. Nice of Microsoft to provide SHA1 hashes so you can make sure you downloaded the image properly.

Login required to download, though.

Yeah. Too bad that. Too bad there's nowhere else you could get it from and have some way to determine whether or not it was the real thing.

Yep, a cryin' shame, that.

Actually, 2005 is what I have already, and that's technically the last version of "Windows Media Center Edition". After XP they've merely made it part of the more complete flavors of Windows.


Tony, I can't figure out how to download anything from that page. Don't you need one of those MSDN subscriptions? I have a Windows Live ID from when I downloaded 7, but I'm not able to download anything on that page.

Yes, you do need an MSDN subscription. But without a subscription, do you still see the file hashes? You can then combine this with the earlier link to make sure that the torrents haven't been interfered with.

I can't check, because I do have an MSDN subscription, and I can download the files.

I do see the file hashes. I'm not familiar with how to compare them, though. How does that work?