Ben; > The rescue disks aren't an OEM copy of WinXP Home, they > are a set of 6 CD's containing a very fixed version of > Partition Quest's partition restorer. I went down into
Ahh... Yeah, you got screwed. I thought those kinds of practices went out with Win98. But yeah, I guess some manufacturers aren't honest. At least be glad you got the cd's. They could have put it on a protected hidden partition on your drive. (The IDE drive specs allow for password protected hidden drive sections.) So if your hard drive failed, so would your copy of XP.... > the bat files that manipulate this thing, and there is > a bios checker to make sure that the bios of the laptop I'm pretty sure the 'bios checker' is probably checking for the digital signature in the BIOS. With XP, Microsoft went pretty strong with digital signatures, putting them into about every file. They probably made OEM's do the same with the bios. That way if you patched it or used some warez bios with some extra feature of some sort, the digital signature wouldn't be correct, and the activation would fail. I have heard of several cases of people upgrading the bios (in some cases to an official one, and in others to a hacked one) and the product activation failing. So I doubt it's a simple check. Not like looking for "HP OEM" string or some such. Something that simple would pretty much defeat the whole point of product activation. You'd see warez sites with lots of patched bios's with the OEM signature checks in, allowing everybody to run a Dell or other OEM version of XP without any activation. Microsoft wouldn't tolerate that. They are too greedy. It'd almost have to be a full cryptographic digital signature. Something that couldn't be easily forged by the warez crowd. That's why I said you'd have to emulate the hardware too. So you could use the original bios. >> I'm a firm believer that a person has a right to the original unmodified >> files (without unneeded OEM specific junk), so if it was me, I'd make an >> effort to get the md5's of the regular OEM version of XP (whatever version) >> and see what is truely different. > > This would be pretty impossible. Maybe not.... I remember with Win98 that even many customized rescue cd's, you could often manage to extract the correct files and create an install disk. With XP it would probably be more difficult. More trouble than it'd be worth. You could probably uninstall a lot of stuff, and comparing files to a regular XP, and so on, and almost get a clean copy. But probably not all the way. And it'd be a lot of trouble. I've never investigated going from an installed copy and trying to make a cd from it. As Hetz said... You might want to look around for a warez copy of xp. Maybe borrow a copy from a friend, that way you'd know it'd be legit. (Be careful about warez programs... they aren't all trustworthy, if you know what I mean!) As long as you are just testing qemu by trying to install it, I don't think anybody would really care. >> I'm definetly not a fan of Microsoft's policies and practices. I do use >> Windows, but I don't like the company. > > Agreed. Having a windows license on my laptop should not > preclude me from running the configuration only *their* > way. In this case, it's HP that's screwing you. With Microsoft's blessing. There is still one chance, though... You might be able to complain enough to HP to get the xp install cd. I have heard of a few cases (with unknown oem's) where either people didn't get a cd at all, or something or other, and they complained long enough to their seller and they gave them the oem version of xp. Can't say that'd actually work though... Or, you could always check ebay! You might be able to pick up a Dell xp cd pretty cheap. (Or other oem cd.) The Dell versions I've seen are pretty close to a plain OEM cd. So you might be able to clean up that cd, copy the few OEM specific files from your HP and make a new cd. If you do it right, it'd still be pre-activated for your system. You'd just be free of the HP extra stuff. Anyway, for you, to test qemu with xp.... you are pretty much out of luck. Sorry. _______________________________________________ Qemu-devel mailing list Qemu-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/qemu-devel
