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@zwaan wrote:

Hi

I have bought a new dell inspiron| 6000 laptop from the dell outlet but it did not come with a windows xp install disk instead it uses a copy on the hard drive. I had to fdisk and format the machine and would like to reinstall windows xp but the COA key doesn't work i have tried both retail and OEM versions but the serial will not work on either. As i want to stay legal with windows and the notebook already has a valid COA is there anyway i can do this.

 

Thanks for reading

Regards
Craig

 

Using the Advanced Forum Search on the bottom of this page, you can quite easily find the answer to this often asked question.

 

You were to create the disk BEFORE you chose to fdisk and format the machine (which of course is also not necessary since if you decided to reinstall XP it takes care of that for you). 

 

As you'll also read on the forum, no retail copy is going to work with your key. 

Yes i did try this with a retail version but xp home is kinda hard to get, i had to download 8gb to get the copy i needed as it came on two dvd's with all versions of windows on them.

I realy should have read the dell pages fisrt as i could have made a restore disk.

I will keep trying to get this to work and let everyone know how i got on

Ok i guess im on my own on this one, well thanks for the help anyway.

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@zwaan wrote:

Yes i did try this with a retail version but xp home is kinda hard to get, i had to download 8gb to get the copy i needed as it came on two dvd's with all versions of windows on them.

I realy should have read the dell pages fisrt as i could have made a restore disk.

I will keep trying to get this to work and let everyone know how i got on

There is no legitimate way to download a copy of Windows from the internet.  If that's what you're doing, then this forum cannot help you as it's a violation of the TOS.

Zwaan,

Call Customer Care and explain what happened. They may be willing to provide you with a CD for reinstalling your OS and keep you working legally.

Good luck,

Lemmi

Glad to hear it worked for you!

And thanks for posting the outcome - that may be helpful for others in a similar situation.