Problems with OEM XP Pro installation.
 

I was given two computers, belonging to a man who had recently died, in exchange for helping his widow out with some of his unfinished business. I am using the more recent of the two and planned to use the other one, via a local wireless network, to back up material from this one and from a couple of others in the house.

Once I had finished extracting the required information for the chap's widow and others I set to tidy the older machine's hard disc up a bit. There was a lot of material of a personal financial nature which I wanted to remove and a lot of other "noise" - a great deal of unwanted Norton, a pile of HP stuff which kept calling home etc. I'm sure you can imagine.

Well, I've been at it, little by little, for over a year and I seemed to be getting somewhere gradually and the machine continued to work perfectly. Anyone who has seen my previous posts asking for help here may have formed ideas about my computer competence but may rest assured that it is worse than it will have appeared!

The machine has an ASUSTek main board, 2Gb ram and about 128Gb HDD and the drive is now about 25% full.

Unfortunately, after my last episode of housekeeping, it won't boot completely. It all goes well and gets to the point where the desktop icons have all appeared and nearly all of the little ones along the bottom too (including Start and the clock) but then it stops and won't do anything more. The boot process seems to get to within just perhaps five seconds or so of satisfactory completion every time.

I have repeatedly started in safe mode and explored pretty well all of the obvious options which come up. Each time I do this it will allow me to take one step down my chosen route and then stops and I have to use the power button to turn it off, whereupon it will let me start it again, in normal or safe mode, and I'm perfectly free to reach the same point once more, but no further!

I think it's pretty clear that I've ditched something vital but I don't know what and I don't know what I can try next. Does anyone have any good (and polite) ideas, please?

If you've got the data off the PC, and you don't specifically *need* any of the other stuff, then for gods sakes don't waste a year of your life - boot with the XP CD, delete the partition and reinstall XP on the fresh disk. I quote 4 hours to build a PC including Windows Updates and things like Acrobat Reader and CutePDF. Surely now you can see that wasting a year pruning is simply that.

Yeah, what Mike said and he put it a lot more politely than I would have, which would have been something starting along the lines of "a year.... :eek:"

Thank you Mike-Bracknell and mixture but it's an OEM installation and I think that's why I don't have a CD. What you suggest is what I would have done from the beginning because I also want to reorganise the directory tree completely, eliminating the name of the dead man from all of it and simplifying it enormously. But I don't know how to do that without a full Windows CD.

This link will remove the previous owners details HERE.

Does pressing F11 on boot get you to the recovery partition?

Perhaps an upgrade to Windows 7 via a reformat would be in order ?

Spurlash2, wouldn't quite remove all user details, plus I think the OP would be best starting fresh, having spent a year fiddling, I don't think we should be encouraging him to fiddle any more.

If you want to retain Windows XP, go to: Keyfinder | Magical Jelly Bean and download the freeware version, which will tell you your product key. Write it down, and then ask any of your friends with computers whether you can borrow (or have a burnt copy of) their OEM XP CD. The CD isn't what constitutes the license so you shouldn't have problems finding someone who'll lend/burn you a copy.

Then it's just a case of downloading and installing the missing hardware drivers, updating via service packs and MS Update, and installing any software you wish.

I could probably lay my hands on a copy of XP but what about WGA? At the moment my XP Pro is genuine, paid for and registered to my computer and I am loth to pay for another new version of Windows, which would be different from what is on this my main computer, when I seem to have no problems with what I've got (if only I could keep my hands off it!). I really don't want WGA issues with Microsoft either.


To say that I have been fiddling with it for a year gives a wrong impression! I used to turn it on every week to update Avast and a few other things and then would turn it off again. Once in a while I would go on to do something else before turning it off and, of those a few times when I had time, I'd root about a bit for half an hour or so. So, during that "year", I probably devoted an hour or two to attempting to tidy the hard drive up.

Erm Mike. It's OEM. There's an obligation to have the Microsoft sticker on the chassis with the product key. :cool:

Hi Mike! Your last post must have coincided with mine so, when I saw yours I thought "great, that's it" but then I thought that I can't follow your suggestion because, of course, that computer cannot quite finish the boot process so cannot download or run Keyfinder.

Ah, I should have read it further. It says that it can work with unbootable systems...... I'll be back!

Yes...., but then it gets complicated. I don't think I want to start dismantling my machines to connect the problem HDD into this, my prime machine. I don't know if I even want to risk it Mike - you have an idea of my limitations. The Magical Jelly Bean offers the use of Windows PE to start up the broken computer to enable analysis of it but the MS walkthrough of the process is far beyond me and requires the creation of a "Technical Computer".

The broken XP was bought and paid for so does that not include some right to get it fixed? Are WGA issues a problem?

Point to the people you know who've had a home visit from Microsoft to check OEM licensing compliance?
:}

No.

There is a reason OEM are so cheap, the two main ones being :

(1) The license is tied to the machine it is supplied with. Machine dies, license dies with it. There are also limitations on what can be classed as an "upgrade" of a chassis.

(2) Microsoft places a contractual obligation on the OEM to provide the End-User with a support. So OEM users should not expect any tea and sympathy from Microsoft if you try to obtain direct support (unless of course you get out your credit card for their paid support service).

99.999999999% of people I know have machines from genuine OEMs and therefore this is a non-issue. And I don't provide any advice to the others.... :cool:

I think it's a reinstall on the same PC, so should in theory have the OEM sticker on the outside anyway. I'm not advocating migrating OEMs to new hardware. :)

oooh... is that Golf Mike Bravo backtracking down the PPRuNe runway..... :E

Would it help to get in touch with ASUS?

OK once again, point to where I advocated piracy? :)

Never said you did.

Anyway, back to the point in question, Cameronian, no harm done trying, although you may find Asus a bit like pulling teeth.

"Nothing ventured, nothing gained", as I think someone said once. By e-mail or chat, do you think? Which is less likely to result in a brush-off....

I would say chat. Less chance of a copy/paste robotic reply.

Good luck, and keep us updated !

Thank you all for your help and good wishes. I'll chat to the monster in his lair but it will have to be tomorrow because today is all booked. I'll let you know.

Hmmm. No answer to my request for a chat but I was invited to fill in a box with a message. Let's hope they come back to me.

I got what seemed like very detailed instructions for how to "recover" a functional XP. "Do this and you'll see that then select this and....." but nothing worked out as their chap said it would. I got different messages on screen and different menus etc. I tried my best to follow steps which most closely resembled what I was told would appear but, no.

This was in response to my short message, sent once their chat failed. I had hoped for an e-mail asking me for more information than would fit into their initial little box so that I could tell them exactly what kit and XP I had, in the hope that it would help.

Once I had tried all of their suggestions I replied to their e-mail with details of what had happened and with all of the information that I thought would be useful but the mail failed because that address didn't accept replies.... That was helpful!

I will have to try to find something else. I certainly would prefer to achieve success through some sort of recovery process because then I wouldn't lose everything on my HDD and have to start again from the very beginning, which I believe would be necessary if I completely reinstalled XP. In addition I don't really want issues with WGA.

Howdy Cameronian,

Sorry to hear about the Acer not getting you very far.

Depends what you're after keeping. If you just want the user data then there are ways and means to back that up. But if you want all the software to be there, then it would be a case of reinstalling (or imaging, but not sure that would be advisable in your case given the state of the source image). Personally I wouldn't view it as such a bad thing, a fresh start could be the cloud with a silver lining.

I believe the Indians are generally pretty relaxed and helpful, but then I haven't had much direct experience of WGA "issues" because the only times I've had to re-install Windows on computers myself it has been with the use of one form or another of volume licensing key or retail boxed copies, which are a different kettle of fish.

Mike-Bracknell has more direct experience spending hours of his life helping home users, so he'll probably be the man to ask about WGA "issues". :E

It sounds to me like you need to put your existing HDD to one side, get another HDD, install it into your PC, then put an OS onto it (you might have to buy that - 2nd hand on ebay?), then add your existing HDD as a 2nd (data) drive, either externally (via a USB caddy or cheap USB - IDE connector) or internally, assuming that you have the wherewithal to do so (space, power, IDE cable, etc.).

That way you don't lose your data, but can access your PC.

SD

With XP you won't get WGA issues as long as you're using a genuine key. It's from Vista onwards that you get activation 'issues'.

Well goodness me, gentlemen. It wasn't what any of you said wot done it (and even less what ASUS contributed) but rather that you kept saying something which kept me trying.

I had gone through safe mode on several occasions to command a return to different restore points - one of them in 2010, fully five months before the upset - all to no avail. I had tried reconfiguring to the last functional setup on two occasions, again to no avail. I had clicked on every hopeful looking bookmark for online help sites and scoured them for promising advice, but without success.

Then a couple of hours ago one of those help sites said "go to a restore point using this link". I gloomily did so and got completely different dialogue boxes displayed from what I had seen on previous attempts so I kept going. I picked a restore point at the end of February 2011 - and I'm convinced that I had tried that very point before - and it worked! I had a couple of hiccups which required reboots but I've got there! :)

Thank you all again!

PS I still have one issue unresolved on this newer machine but I tried you all on that about a year ago so I'll give you all a bit more of a rest before I bring it up again.......

I knew it! I spoke just a little too soon....

Now the screen goes black repeatedly for only a second or two before coming back perfectly. It seems to do it more frequently if I'm pressing keys ore moving the mouse. Then an error message appeared - "The application or DLL C:\WINDOWS\System32\script.dll is not a valid Windows image. Please check this against your installation diskette"

I don't have an installation diskette!

Actually, I don't even understand!

FIXED! I must be picking up something from you stars!

^^^^ THIS, except you'll be able to harvest the OEM license key using the keyfinder now you've managed to boot into it. *Please* stop trying the futile task of repairing a broken PC when you don't know (and will never know) fully why it's broken. Honestly, cut your losses and get a new hard drive and reinstall. You'll then be working from a known-good configuration and will have confidence in the PC's ability to actually DO the tasks it's asked to do.

(I don't think any of us "stars" would normally try and dissuade you from doing something genuinely productive if we thought you'd learn from it....but one of the first things you learn as an IT guru is when to give up and reimage the PC).

Mike's unfortunatley hit the nail on the head here.

The problem with Windows in particular as an OS to fix is that it's such an intertwined rabbit warren. It's why the forensics guys love it.... :E

Probably the greatest warren of all is the registry. If something's gone awry in your registry then you've pretty much had it. And there's no real way to tell if a registry is healthy because some of the symptoms displayed could be related to something altogether unrelated.

As Mike said, it's certainly in everyone's interest to ensure IT knowledge is passed on down the line of experience. The problem here is it is difficult to define exactly what experience needs to be passed on.

Anyway, having said that, it sounds like your restore point seems to be working out. Although it is worth remembering for the future is that they can be a double-edged sword, I generally see them as more of a last resort, which I guess applies to your present scenario !

I'm sure I'll probably now have a dream tonight about you coming back here to haunt us saying you've reached the end of your year long saga with a perfectly working computer in hand !

Well, it seems to work fine now - just as before, as one might expect. I shall take some time away from it (it's only destined for backup, after all). When I revisit it I shall first make an effort to review what I want to keep - probably less than one might think, I expect - and what I shall need for the backup function for two or three other computers in the house. Then I shall develop a plan,,,,,

Thank you all, yet one more time!