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Burn WinXP OS from HDD

2

21stHermit

Senior member
I posted over at Notebook Reviews and two members suggested you can burn a copy of the XP boot disk off the HD. This would make up for the "fact" that Dell no longer provides OEM copies of WinXP on a CD.

Is their and truth to any of this, or am I just lost? 😕

Hermit
 
I'm not sure whether this is possible or not. You can make a set of boot disks. I have taken the much easier route of just using Norton Ghost to create a mirror image of my laptop's drive. I made one when I first got my system, I then uninstalled all the extra crap that the OEMs put on and created another image, which I burned to a DVD-RW disc. I create new images monthly or before I tinker with installing / uninstalling major software components. I also run Registry Mechanic on a regular basis to clean the registry of bad links, etc.

The first thing I do when I get an OEM laptop is create an image of the disk. I use Partition Magic to break up the drive into OS and Data partitions then create another image of just the OS partition.

I believe that Dell now creates a hidden partition with the necessary restore stuff on it. You would have to have a partition utility, like Partition Magic, to see it though.

Try Notebook Forums for additional help on this subject.

Any image / backup would only work on laptops with similar specs ( ie. the machine at came from ) and would probably not work on other systems.
 
When I got my laptop, I just called and told them I needed the disks and they sent them. I think it's nonsense that they don't include them or try to charge extra to have them included.
 
I did the exact same thing. I had to call Dell to complain, anyway, since my mouse had a big gash in the cord so I just killed two birds with one stone and told them I also needed the Windows disk.
 
Yes, the Dell machines did at one time have a utility pre-installed to burn yourself a copy of the XP boot CD, but they have not included it for some time.

The online chat suffices to get yourself replacement CD's, but make sure you also ask for CD's for pre-installed programs, like PowerDVD and such. If you only ask for OS restore CD's, you'll get a WindowsXP CD, a drivers CD, and a utilities CD. You won't get CD's for things like PowerDVD or Sonic RecordNow!, etc, etc...
 
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