Activation/Cdkey required on an HPA install? -updated-

[off1c3r]

FYI, I ran into a similar situation when trying to upgrade the HD in my X31. I purchased a new Hitachi 5400 rpm 160gb HD and tried to use the restore discs to do a fresh install of Windows XP and all the IBM software. The discs did a partial install but then asked me to activate Windows. Resetting the bios back to the default settings solved the problem. I didn't have to scrub and reformat the drive once I'd done that -- it let me use the recovery discs from the beginning and did a full install of the OS and IBM software.

Its interesting to know that others had the same issue. For some reason.. which is annoying beyond belief.. I have to remove a stick of ram everytime I want to reinstall from HPA... not that I do it often, its just with the original image on the HD.. that wasn't the case.. with 2gigs of ram or not..

[invisibleman]

I've been in this situation once before. The reason might be that for some reason during installation between amy restarts/reboot thinkad booted from HDD rather than from CD and this caused problem with an activation key.

[Brad]

Resetting the BIOS to the default settings fixed my problem.

Brad