so microsoft wants my companies blood....

Thought it was the golden rule, no install disc with the machine no installation. Was when purchasing a pre-loved Dell Latitude. It came with the CoA sticker on the underside but the company selling would not install Windows XP. Had to go out and find a Dell Windows XP Pro disc. Thought actually purchasing the disc without a machine was the illegal part.

Good luck and you know if was not for lawyers, we would not need lawyers!

i try to avoid HP computers to begin with .. but the last few i have had to deal with did not come with a backup or reinstall CD at all new ... you have it on a special partition on the HD .. if you wanted a physical CD it was something you had to get seperatly from HP or burn your own from the partition ...

the issue is a lot of those restore CD's have the cd key already on them as well so they match up to the machine they came with (with dell at least) so even including one you have from a stack it may have to have the number changed to match the one on the side of the case (well i know this is true with the xp svc pack 3 and vista business disc's from dell i have a stack of about 40 of those) ...

All of my Dell restore discs the coa is irrelevant. Any serial will work. Technically they should of removed the coa sticker from that machine to sell it. Even with no install as this Microsoft case against us says. Hoping for updates soon it's no good when stuff takes forever.

thomas998 said:

You are lucky. The last Compaq I bought had the restore on some special hard drive partition... burning it to CDs required 21... yes 21 CDs. I'm sure if I every have to restore it that there will also be tons of bloat on those CDs as 21 Cds was about 2 DVDs worth of data and I'm pretty certain that the biggest copy of Windows would never take more than 1 DVD.

Click to expand...

That's exactly how mine were too! Mess up the hard drive and you are TOTALLY screwed!
I went to make a back up with CDs, thinking that it might take 3 at most...nope! I ended up stopping at 9 because my frustration was about to cause all those CDs to snap!

idrinorbarsaku said:

That's exactly how mine were too! Mess up the hard drive and you are TOTALLY screwed!
I went to make a back up with CDs, thinking that it might take 3 at most...nope! I ended up stopping at 9 because my frustration was about to cause all those CDs to snap!

Click to expand...

Compaq = Computer on Craq.

At one time, they also used to store a large portion of the BIOS on the HDD too. It wasn't a huge deal if you wipe the drive, but then if you ever wanted to edit the BIOS again, you were hosed.

cwa107 said:

Compaq = Computer on Craq.

At one time, they also used to store a large portion of the BIOS on the HDD too. It wasn't a huge deal if you wipe the drive, but then if you ever wanted to edit the BIOS again, you were hosed.

Click to expand...

That's a funny way to talk Compaq,