<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > The rescue disks aren't an OEM copy of WinXP Home, they > > are a set of 6 CD's containing a very fixed version of > > Partition Quest's partition restorer. I went down into > > Ahh... > > Yeah, you got screwed. > > I thought those kinds of practices went out with Win98. > > But yeah, I guess some manufacturers aren't honest.
Well, it keeps you from reusing the media on a machine that it's licensed for, but what I'm trying to do is setup my XP on my laptop in a QEMU session. I've looked through the batch files, and it uses a partition quest binary to do the actual restore, as long as it passes the bios id check. > At least be glad you got the cd's. They could have put it on a protected > hidden partition on your drive. (The IDE drive specs allow for password > protected hidden drive sections.) So if your hard drive failed, so would > your copy of XP.... Yeah, I've already had another HP laptop disk crash. > > the bat files that manipulate this thing, and there is > > a bios checker to make sure that the bios of the laptop > > I'm pretty sure the 'bios checker' is probably checking for the digital > signature in the BIOS. Nope. Just the bios id. > With XP, Microsoft went pretty strong with digital signatures, putting them > into about every file. > > They probably made OEM's do the same with the bios. > > That way if you patched it or used some warez bios with some extra feature of > some sort, the digital signature wouldn't be correct, and the activation > would fail. Possibly. But it would be interesting to try to install it *if* I could set the bios ID on the command line in qemu. > > I have heard of several cases of people upgrading the bios (in some cases to > an official one, and in others to a hacked one) and the product activation > failing. well, again, I'm not terribly thrilled about Microsoft, but I would like see if it's possible. If M$ did something else to prevent it from running, then that I can't do anything about. It is pretty fragile. When I tried to remove the hibernate partition, XP stopped booting. > > So I doubt it's a simple check. Not like looking for "HP OEM" string or some > such. Something that simple would pretty much defeat the whole point of > product activation. You'd see warez sites with lots of patched bios's with > the OEM signature checks in, allowing everybody to run a Dell or other OEM > version of XP without any activation. The bios id is part of the directory struture that HP uses. > Microsoft wouldn't tolerate that. They are too greedy. It'd almost have to > be a full cryptographic digital signature. Something that couldn't be easily > forged by the warez crowd. I suppose I could remaster the CD's to use QEMU/Bochs's bios signature, but it'd be easier if I didn't have to do that. > > That's why I said you'd have to emulate the hardware too. So you could use > the original bios. yep. > > >> I'm a firm believer that a person has a right to the original unmodified > >> files (without unneeded OEM specific junk), so if it was me, I'd make an > >> effort to get the md5's of the regular OEM version of XP (whatever > >> version) and see what is truely different. > > > > This would be pretty impossible. > > Maybe not.... > > I remember with Win98 that even many customized rescue cd's, you could often > manage to extract the correct files and create an install disk. That may be worth pursuing, just so I can have a recovery disk in case things really go boom > > With XP it would probably be more difficult. More trouble than it'd be > worth. You could probably uninstall a lot of stuff, and comparing files to a > regular XP, and so on, and almost get a clean copy. But probably not all the > way. And it'd be a lot of trouble. > > I've never investigated going from an installed copy and trying to make a cd > from it. > > As Hetz said... You might want to look around for a warez copy of xp. Maybe > borrow a copy from a friend, that way you'd know it'd be legit. (Be careful > about warez programs... they aren't all trustworthy, if you know what I mean!) I have a copy of XPHome, but I would like to see if I can get all the extras that are on the the rescue disks. I can reinstall them from there, on to the XPHome, but that's a lot extra work. Ben _______________________________________________ Qemu-devel mailing list Qemu-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/qemu-devel