Well, the other day my fiancee's hard drive crapped out on her laptop, so I went to newegg.com and bought her a new one. It showed up today and I realized that her computer had internal back up, so there was never a backup disk or disks made. What I'm wondering is how to reinstall Windows XP if I don't have a disk? I don't want to pay $200 for something I don't need. Please help!

where did her original HD come from?

if you don't have discs, you are out of luck as far as installing XP

you'll have to buy a new copy (unless you know someone that can get you a copy... there are applications around to counter the windows genuine check)

Is it possible to somehow backup my desktop computer and install it on the new hard drive of her laptop?

However, since there are a few Microsoft employees on the board, this sort of behavior is not smiled upon...

you may be able to ghost your hard drive and put an exact copy of it onto her harddrive, but i'm not sure how much the software costs to do that

Well, can't any of these employees help me???!?!?

for $200 they can

not the answer I was looking for...

Sorry... I'm not very tech savvy...

http://www.symantec.com/norton/products/overview.jsp?pcid=br&pvid=ghost14

look into something like this perhaps

do you have the original product key for your GF's XP?

I might, I have to look through boxes and boxes of stuff. It doesn't help that I moved in 3 months ago and we moved everything around and she moved in March (last march)

If the old drive is "dead", an imaging program like ghost won't help since you won't be able to make an image from the dead drive.

MS will let you re-install XP on the same system as long as the majority of the components are the same (cpu, ram, disk drive etc.), but you need the original laptop install disks or XP disks. Without the disks, I believe you're out of luck.

Maybe the product key will help, but I think MS has to verify it is going on the "original" system, so it will require system info which you won't be able to get without booting.

The old hd is definitely dead. I start up in "system startup" mode and when I go to hard disk it says "none identified"

So I can't go past that screen

I do have the Microsoft product key, it was on the bottom of the computer, along with the serial number for the computer and microsoft certificate of authenticity

what next?

Tech.support for the computer mfg. (dell, or toshiba or whatever). If they can't/won't help, then MS. In any case, you're looking at a few hours on the phone.

Since it's a laptop, you might be better off taking it to a repair shop. Good luck.

the IT guys here at work say you should be able to ghost any hard drive that works and put that image on your new hard drive

then you can re-enter the unique windows genuine key through windows

I might be able to get a brand new copy of windows xp for free that hasn't been used yet, so it would be unique to her computer. MIGHT, and no, i'm not downloading it or stealing it or pirating it, I have a friend who might be able to get a copy through work

who made the laptop? if it's one of the major manufacturers you can definitely get a restore disc. They'll probably just ask you to cover shipping cost.

Since you have the license theres nothing illegal by someone offering a disc for the corresponding license.

It's a Toshiba Satellite 1135-s155