That is great info...

Two situations here in front of me...

Dell XP CD Part #R2490 I can put it in a Dell laptop with no OS on the hard drive and it boots and installs XP...

I put it into a non dell and it does not boot...
I boot to a floppy call up a dir and execute the setup.exe and it says it cannot run this in dos mode..

I have the XP cd's from compac, they boot in the same test machine but the come up with a bios test failed and do not install...

So how do I get XP to install on this test box...

Do I need a non-dos boot floppy to run the Dell setup?

Believe it or not adding ram requires a reactivation.
The windows that companies preinstall is OEM software - Microsoft is supposed to only activate this stuff once, though if you can provide a good explanation then in my experience they are very helpful and will reactivate it.
Personally I don't see why I should require permsission from Microsoft to add more RAM. I think that the reactivation would be better if it were only required when a number of components changed at once.

...and free, too :)

If you boot the system with a Windows 98 boot disk, you'll see a very small (less than 20 MB) FAT16 partition if you run "fdisk /status"

WinXP needs either a small (10MB or so) partition already on the drive if you don't want to predefine/format the entire disk before you install the O/S if you're booting the system from the XP CD.

Normally I either create a small partition (4GB or less) on the drive and format it using FAT32, then boot using the XP CD (and use partitioning software later to expand the existing partition), or I format the entire drive with FAT32, boot from the XP CD to install the O/S, and convert the existing partition to NTFS (quick format.)

(Yes, this is a hassle, but it's been the only way I've found of getting XP on a system directly from a non-OEM CD. If I spent more time trying to come up with a better solution, I'd probably find one, but my time is better spent on more productive issues.)

See above reason...

Thanks for the info..

M$ sure does not want to tell you that...

They always say to go buy a FULL version...

I did what you said and it installed on the system I was testing...

The Compaq uses some sort of Disc Image program so it still will not work but the Dell CD did...

Lemme clear up some misconceptions, because I've done all of these things:

• Installing a new motherboard in an installed Windows XP system might make you reactivate, however, you don't have to call Microsoft-- if you have Internet access, you can do it that way, too.
• An OEM is not required by law to give you a full version of the software with your systems. Most OEMs make it available, though, upon request, or at least make product recovery CDs available for the system. An OEM is only responsible for restoring the system to the way it came from the factory, if that, and nothing more. Some have agreements with Microsoft to provide the media for up to one year, but that's not some law or something.
• Even when an OEM provides the CD, they can modify the CD boot image as needed. Certain OEM systems do have BIOS locks in place where the boot CD will only boot/run on their particular systems. This is more to prevent piracy then some kind of "lock-in".
• With these same CDs, it's just the El Torito bootable image that gets modified, not the actual OS installation files. It's just the bootsector information that makes it bootable per BIOS.
• To start a Windows XP installation from DOS, you'd type winnt.exe from the i386 directory to start it up. That means you should be able to install from it, regardless of where you got that CD from.