This was replying to Alan (or who cares) because I can't figure out what switch needs to be thrown?
to make the quote feature do what I want.? If only there was a referrence and a spell checker...
"Taxing the brain, With XP, one had to mod the registry to go back to the bios for
the disk driver if the motherboard IDE or SATA driver changes. Then at first boot
on the new hardware, it will install the appropriate hard disk driver and video drivers.
Can anybody remember the details?
Alan VK2ZIW"
On Wed, Nov 2, 2022 at 12:10 PM, jb wrote:
Unfortunately, detailed explanations of how this was done have been purged from forums and groups
along with any valid license keys because usoft sifts through the internet to kill any mention.
If you have an activated installation with updates and software you want to keep, you can image that and
have a recovery back to where you won't have to screw around with much to get back to normal if all that
crashed was a hard drive and the machine is the same.
Many XP OEMs had a hidden recovery partion that could be activated either by a recovery boot disk or from
running a utility if you could boot up.? This would give you a fresh "out of the box" installation all pre-activated
(but requiring updates).? Using wrong versions of imaging software or incorrectly is likely to wipe out this
feature leaving you without a valid license.?
What you describe is the "bare-metal" solution, that recovers an image that is custom built, mostly virgin in its
registry, and has a variety of drivers that will install minimally, at the first run.? This gives you a mostly clean install,
and will only work if the activation conditions are met (part of the build).? If activation fails, you can trick it to give
you a grace period, but after that you can't get things to work and can't fix it without ratting yourself out to usoft.?
I don't know if it works anymore with XP since it's no longer supported.
DOS, win9x and 2000 don't require activation.? Just have a good key.? Never put your good key on the internet
or it will go dead.
