Thinkpads Forum

So I wanted to get rid of all the junk on my T60 (factory installed XP) and do a clean install of XP without all the bloatware. I noted down my XP key (using a keyfinder), downloaded an ISO of XP SP3 from my company's MSDN, and was trying to use my XP key instead to register but it just wont accept my key. Any ideas?

You didn't blow away the restore partition, did you? If you didn't, Rescue and Recovery will let you customize what gets installed.

Anyway, that key might only work on OEM installs of XP, not Corporate installs.

No, the restore partition is still there. I didn't knew we can customize what gets installed through RnR. But I still want to use my own ISO so I know for sure there is no bloatware whatsoever.

I guess I'm stuck right now as the MSDN only has corporate ISO's.

There probably is a way to prevent customization from running - when you first install the image, it installs a clean XP image, then the Lenovo drivers, then applications in a couple passes, then runs sysprep.

I opened up RnR (pressed the blue ThinkVantage during bootup) and once in, I selected "Launch Advanced RnR". After this, the screen changed and I could see some items on the left but clicking them did nothing. The links were clickable but nothing happened after the click. There is no disk activity and I waited for 5 minutes to check if it's still trying to load or something but no luck. Nothing happened. I clicked restart in the same window and it prompted me to make sure all open windows are closed before continuing. But there were no open windows. I tried this twice but the same thing happened. It's just weird.

Look for Base Software Administrator
It lets you remove resp. UNcheck bloatware from the Restore partition.
Very handy indeed!

If you downloaded the ISO image from your company's MSDN account, that means it should likely
have a Volume License Key for the ISO. Use that key, not the IBM/Lenovo key which is OEM.
Those keys have nothing to do with each other, so therefore will never work.
To illustrate, I downloaded my Windows 7 Enterprise ISO image from where I work, and I used its VLK, not OEM or retail keys.
It accepted it and activated fine. I hope that helped you.

ARD,

yup, it has a Volume License Key but I don't want to use that coz I'm not supposed to. I want to use my key instead (the one which came with my T60) to register the copy. Looks like these are 2 completely different "editions" and will never work the way I wanted to.

Thanks everyone for their inputs. I'll see if there is some other way to do it.

To install from an OEM install, you need an OEM disk. Doesn't have to be Lenovo, although it'll fail to activate until you feed it the Lenovo key.