joecape
January 14th, 2010, 12:26 AM
I've put together all the parts of a PC and thought I could use an old copy of W***ndows XP I had just to get things started and then later upgrade to w*ndows 7 and put Ubuntu on a second partition (I'm told I need to do things that way round: windows first, anything else will be more tolerant of not being the only OS when you try installing it as a second OS) . After going through the installation steps for XP, it asked me for the product key, which was fine - or it should have been - as I had that marked down. However, I failed to realize that the product key gives a license to install on just one PC and obviously that had been used up.
So now, if I try booting from the CD drive, it goes straight from the manufacturer start-up to a prompt, saying I need to select the correct boot drive, or put something into the selected boot drive. It does this when I have an XP start-up disk in, and when I have the Ubuntu (version 9) disk in. If I allow the hard disk to be used for secondary load-up i.e. giving the CD drive priority, it skips whatever CD is in the drive and goes to a re-setting Windows XP installation screen, asking for the XP Home edition CD (although this didn't happen when I tried the same thing on a laptop, so the discs are fine ).
Do I need to wipe the hard disk so that it forgets that I was installing XP (when I first started installing XP, I chose to partition 80GB of the hard disk and format it) ? Can I do this from the BIOS? I knew it was a bad idea to trust MS!!!
So now, if I try booting from the CD drive, it goes straight from the manufacturer start-up to a prompt, saying I need to select the correct boot drive, or put something into the selected boot drive. It does this when I have an XP start-up disk in, and when I have the Ubuntu (version 9) disk in. If I allow the hard disk to be used for secondary load-up i.e. giving the CD drive priority, it skips whatever CD is in the drive and goes to a re-setting Windows XP installation screen, asking for the XP Home edition CD (although this didn't happen when I tried the same thing on a laptop, so the discs are fine ).
Do I need to wipe the hard disk so that it forgets that I was installing XP (when I first started installing XP, I chose to partition 80GB of the hard disk and format it) ? Can I do this from the BIOS? I knew it was a bad idea to trust MS!!!