OEM Windows XP

What garbage. I had no idea how highly limited OEM copies of Windows are! I thought they were just limited to being used on the machine they were purchased for.

I have just found out that even if I obtain the software and instructions necessary to reformat my hard drive, any hard drive I wish to use in this machine will be hobbled by a "recovery partition", and the OEM copy of XP will only function in this way! Bah, I don't want a "recovery partition" junking up my drive.

Has anyone had a similar experience and found a way around it? Is there anything I can do short of purchasing a SECOND copy of Windows for this machine?

 

Sorry, the first dozen or so sites I saw providing instructions on creating bootable CDs all said I needed a real XP CD.

Still, according to Compaq, the installer on my "XP recovery" cd's will always reformat the drive and create this "recovery partition" during the installation process, if it doesn't already exist. My assumption is that any possible procedure to install the XP files manually is going to be way, way over my head. Does that sound correct?

 

OK, I created the boot disk and was able to use the diskpart.exe utility to delete the partition I want to get rid of, but I can't figure out how to extend C: to include the space that was previously allocated to the unwanted partition.

I think the "Extend" command does this, but I couldn't get it to work. Apparent misuse of the "clean" command earned me the opportunity to start over from scratch with the OEM recovery disks and a blank hard drive

Any help would be much appreciated. I think that all I need to do is use the diskpart.exe utility from the BartPE boot disk to eliminate the D partition and resize C to include the entire disk.

 

but could you give me a hint as to which diskpart.exe command to use, or whatever other utility will work?

As best as I can understand from reading the diskpart.exe documentation, "extend" is the command I need to expand my C partition to include the space previously allocated to the deleted D partition. But I can't get it to work... when I try, I either get a warning that I'm using the wrong arguments, or a warning that the selected partition is not eligible for expansion.

So far, trial-and-error has sent me back to square 1, so I'm wary about further experimentation.

 

never mind, apparently diskpart.exe cannot extend C... so uhm, yeah.

 

Meh, thanks for the help, but after doing this I am left with 6 gigs of unallocated space on the disk and no apparent way to reallocate it under C:

Also, now every time I boot up I'm asked which copy of XP I want to run. I don't see how two copies of the same OS can be installed on a single partition. This is worse than when I started. Am I missing something?

 

I agree with your statement completely it is a pain and more and more are doing it.

This is what I did and have had no problems:- first make the recovery CD's you may need them if you botch the OS, next just delete the partition they create, with disk manager, then reformat drive and you should then just have one drive C: Hope that helps it worked on my last Compaq

 

Thanks for the advice but I think you misunderstand my predicament.

With the Compaq recovery CDs, there is no way to install onto a drive with only a C partition. If the D "recovery partition" does not exist, the recovery CDs will reformat the disk and create the recovery partition from scratch.

Deleting the D partition is not the problem. Reallocating the space under C: is what I need to do, and apparently I need an expensive program called "Partition Magic" to do that.

Also, wouldn't reformatting the whole drive leave me without an operating system again ?

 

Sorry about that yeeha, it has been awhile since I did mine, you might want to try this http://www.majorgeeks.com/Partition_Logic_d4780.html alot have had luck running this to use the unalocated space

 

Thanks very much, in retrospect I don't even need the 6gigs that much, and I don't even know if the recovery partition impacts the drive's overall performance, but at this point I'm just PO'd about the fact that there is a limitation at all.

Now it's just the principle of the thing.. I know WinXP will run just fine on 1 hard disk with only a C partition, and it annoys me that I was invoiced a copy of WinXP Home and a 40gig drive instead of a "half-assed limited copy of WinXP home" and a "36 gig drive with 4 gigs reserved for Compaq software".