Hello Friends,
Thank you for coming on this Thread.
There is a question for you.
Windows XP Reinstall Questions?
So I want to wipe the hard drive and reinstall Windows XP on my Dell Inspiron 8600 laptop.
I don't have the original recovery disks, but I do have the COA and Product Key on the bottom of the laptop.
I originally bought the laptop on ebay with the OS installed on a 40GB hard drive, but am using a 120GB hard drive from another Dell laptop which the OS was installed on with the recovery disks when we still had them, but now has viruses or something on it.
I'm assuming the product key on my laptop has already been used at least once, would I be able to use it again? if I bought a Retail XP Pro Installation Disk, would that work? I hear that an OEM product key can't be used with a Retail disk. I could also connect the hard drives to another computer via USB, the 40GB drive is a clean drive but obviously I want to use the 120GB drive. So say if I formatted the 120 hard drive with the other computer and transferred everything from the 40GB drive onto the 120GB drive would that be the same as a Restore?
2 months ago Report Abuse
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I've found that restore hd disks sells third party disks, not the official ones and that they're not safe.
Also, no one I know has those disks and their very difficult to find on ebay. Although just a regular "official" XP installation disk is pretty easy to find and a bit cheaper, could I just use that? do I actually need the Dell recovery disks to reinstall the operating system?
I also don't have the recovery partition (The Ctrl + F11 Method) I found and followed the instructions on how to access the recovery partition and it didn't work.
Any other ideas?
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