Shared Knowledge

“HP Laptop and Authentic Windows XP Validation Failure”

 

20 September 2005

 

 

 

I have a Hewlett Packard (HP) N5190 laptop, which came with an OEM version of Windows ME installed. Recently, I bought the Windows XP professional upgrade and applied it to my system and it activated fine but then when I logged onto the Windows upgrade site, the new authentic Windows validation tool failed my laptop, telling me I had an OEM version of Windows XP installed and was not licensed to receive any downloads other than critical security updates! What?

 

Having worked on this laptop before I was aware that there are actually 2 partitions on the hard disk, the active partition which holds the operating system and another, smaller partition, which was put there by HP. Anyway, by looking at system information, I could tell that when Windows XP was installed, it did not overwrite the some or all of the Windows ME product identification and thus that was why the Windows update site authentic Windows validation tool was failing my system.

 

I contacted Windows support help via email but could not get them to understand my problem and that their validation tool was not taking into consideration cases like I had where, yes, once upon a time I had an OEM version of Windows but no longer and should not now be denied updates when I had bought a legal Windows XP professional upgrade! 

 

With no help from Microsoft, back to the laptop and this time, I used an old Windows 95 boot floppy disk to boot the laptop and then used the Fdisk command to remove all partitions on the hard drive. I then created a single new partition and made it active.

 

Now with a clean, single partition hard disk, I booted from the Windows XP upgrade CD-ROM and reinstalled Windows XP professional. At the beginning of the install, it said that it could not find any installed qualifying Windows operating systems and so I inserted an old Windows 95 CD-Rom I had and Windows XP upgrade accepted the old version and then when ahead and installed (note that I did not have to actually install Windows 95, just insert it into the CD-ROM drive for a second so Windows XP install could actually find that I had a prior version of Windows).

 

After my clean installation of Windows XP professional, again I went to the Windows upgrade website and this time the authentic Windows validation tool confirmed that I had a valid version!

 

Although I deleted both partitions on the hard disk and did a fresh install of Windows XP, it might have been possible to have just deleted the one small HP partition and perhaps then a reload of Windows XP would have solved the authentic product tool validation problem, I do not know.

 

The bottom line is then that perhaps you have a similar problem in that there is information on your hard drive somewhere, like in a separate partition, which is keeping the Windows authentication tool of validating your copy of Windows XP.