G40 restore cd

[BeemerBiker]

I have a G40 with a new hard drive and I cannot find a restore disk. Maybe there isnt one. I have a valid product key.

Obviously (??) I cannot use a Dell, unfortunately, I got a bunch of dell xp pro cd's.

The company I work for has a corporate license and I tried that disk. It does not like the IBM Oem key product. It took a long time to get to the point where I could enter in the key, with I could have known sooner and I would not have bothered.

Googleing around I see where in feb 05 microsoft has bios locked xp. Not exactly sure what that means. I assume IBM was in on the locking and would think that my product key should match something in the bios for the notebook. The bios has been upgraded, not sure if that caused the problem.

Surely some version of XP can be activated with the product key. On other systems I get the opportunity to call in. This one simply says "Type in the volume product license key below" and then says "The product key you entered is not valid". There are no other options like calling in.

what to do?

[Zedicus]

you just need to find a matching version of windows to exactly what the key you hav is for... an xp key for a retail copy of xp pro is different then an OEM copy of XP Pro and is different from a corp. copy of xp pro... im actually not completly sure of the legality of installing windows from a source other then the repair disks, though i have activated a copy of xp home that was installed from a copied cd on a laptop with a home license on it that did not have the restore cd's anymore so it does work...

hope that helped, jus ask if you need more explenation...

also the bios locking doesnt meen you cant install a plain windows cd on some machines, it just keeps you from using restore cd's on non authentic computers...

[cpn]

Yes, what you need is just a good old plain vanilla OEM copy of XP. Any OEM XP media that is not "branded" will work. BIOS locking, is taking an OEM copy of XP and making sure it can only be installed on a certain brand of PC. Dell is a good example of this. In fact Dell has gone so far, that if you use their disk on a Dell machine, you don't even have to enter a key. An IBM copy would of course work for you, but I don't think IBM has had a plain copy of XP ever, I think they always had the recovery disk system. If you do a google search, you will find a few places where you can buy authentic plain OEM media. You do NOT have to buy another license since you already of a COA on the bottom of your Laptop that is your proof of ownership. Just buy the media. Now, whether or not this is legal is a good question, it certainly is a gray area. But as an OEM system builder in the past, we would buy the COA's and the media separately not is the same quantities, because just like the big boys, a customer would have to pay extra if they wanted the disks.

Craig

[tfflivemb2]

You could also try posting in the For Sale/Want to Buy conference for a set of G40 restore disks. Be sure to give your full model/type number.

People in this forum are very nice and might be willing to send you a copy for the cost of shipping, or in some cases, for free.

[BeemerBiker]

thanks everybody, I used an old XP service pack "0" generic disk to install and was able to activate it. However, I am unsure why our corporate version failed to work. When I returned the CD to our material control dept, they seemed surprised and said the disk had worked on dell's. We buy mostly dells where I work for desktops and laptops starting about 1 year ago or so. That is about when they switched over to XP from win2k. New computers routinely had XP replaced by 2K and that was a management decision that was valid (???) back then. Most systems are still Win2k in our division (except notebooks)