ORIGINAL OS CD MISSING?

princess4peace

I purchased a HP Notebook with everything intact, but lost my Operating System CD(still have my recovery DVD). I have already validated my OS with Microsoft and register the same product with HP.

Recently, I have downloaded the trial version of windows server 2k3 for practise towards my 70-290 exams before the end of April 2006. My problems now are:

(1) I need to use my laptop for the practice and the condition with the trial version is that i will have to reformat my hard drive after the 180 days of usage
(2)I will like to re-installing my original OS after the proposed formatting of the trial version. The original CD got lost

What is the recommendation(s) from members here.

Thanks All

TeKniques

1) Use virtual PC or VMWare to avoid formatting if your laptop can handle the load. (If it can't then just get more ram).

2) Contact HP and explain your situation and maybe they will send a replacement disk for you.

That is what I would suggest anyhow. Good luck!

Gogousa

Instead of installing the W2K3 on your laptop, install a virtual machine in your laptop and installed there. Much easier and you can run several copies of (as long as you have physical memory for each virtual machine).
For the original CD you can call HP, I don’t know how much it cost. Did you check if you have a partition on the HD with the original installation?

shadown7

I lost the OS cd as well. I just called HP and they sent me out a new disc.

jescab

HP usually installs the install cd on a separate partition.
HP will send you a new OS cd for about $10 (USD)

TheShadow

If you are going to do a lot of this on your laptop I would invest in a cheap external USB hard drive; 120-160GB are down to around $100 on sale. You can make images with a copy of symantec norton ghost or Acronis trueimage imaging software. You can then send a image of your laptop disk to the external and images of your various test setups. You really need to learn basic imaging anyway so you kill two problems with one bolder. Free equivalents of the programs can be found off of this link http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilities/backupandimage.shtml

If you look at symantec choose carefully as they have two different products call ghost one is a rebadged product when they picked up partition magic and drive image. last year.

woodworm

You could image you're laptop using Ghost or similar and then drop the image back on it when you've finished ...

Agree with everyone else about Virtual Machine being the better option though, and you should contact HP for a new CD regardless ....