Cpq nx5000

Interesting. nc6000 is quite similar to nx5000 I understand, but Vista Loader 2.x did not work for me. I shall try again.

 

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Yes, all other cracks were removed. Both using voatktools and to be sure, from Windows Recovery Environment, used bootinst /nt60 all to neuter any remaining gkend/vista loader and in registry checked for OemBiosDevice and royal.sys.

It is something strange involved in the BIOS I am sure because all these OEM BIOS emulation cracks modify boot process and afterwards Vista fails booting. Most people who have trouble can at least boot Vista. In my case it doesn't come up or BSODs with Stop Error 0xA5: BIOS not fully ACPI compliant.

 

I did. (Also %1 is first parameter, you can just do install.cmd HP and program will set VLFILE to that . . .)

You are not understanding, it doesn't get to the point where this change would matter. It _hangs_ before Vista kernel is even loaded. It hangs immediately when GRUB4DOS tries loading BOOTMGR. So something it does at that stage (related to SLIC loading) interferes with BOOTMGR working.

 

I decided to investigate why Vista Loader 2.2.0 was hanging. It is GRUB4DOS based and being Linux user I am familiar with grub. I used hex editor (xvi32.exe) on it and saw that it embedded a menu.lst. I changed "timeout 0" to "timeout 9" and tried again. This time it gave me a boot menu and I was able to edit the commands and use command line.

First thing I noticed on command line was that "root (hd0,0)" gave me "Error 19: Cannot mount selected partition", which means it was not able to recognise and mount NTFS to reach BOOTMGR.

Now grub and GRUB4DOS can both chainload bootsectors and boot from them without having to recognise or read a file system, so I decided that I would use grubinst.exe to install the GRUB4DOS first stage into MBR and revert the bootloader on the partition using bootsect /nt60 c: so it would boot from the bootsector and NTFS would not be involved. After doing this I hex edited GRLDR to change the menu commands:

Code:

find --set-root /bootmgr
chainloader /bootmgr

I changed to

Code:

rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

But this time GRUB4DOS's first stage sees the NTFS partition but does not recognise its boot sector, so fails to load GRLDR. It suggests to create a small FAT12/16/32 partition and put GRLDR in that.

Now Vista's partitioning skips first 1 MiB of hard disk before creating first partition, which is enough space for a small FAT12 partition. GRUB4DOS uses first 13 sectors of hard disk, I found out. So using Linux live DVD (KNOPPIX 5.3.1) and Parted I created a small partition from 14th sector to 2047th sector (slightly less than 1 MiB) and copied GRLDR to it.

Next boot, Vista Loader loads!!!

Unfortunately, no SLIC according to Everest and Vista activation.

My RSDT is even writable. Still Vista Loader 2.2.0 and GKend Vista BootMgr 0527 cannot create a SLIC in it. And Vista remains unactivated.

 

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Had to remove Vista Loader to make SP1 install, otherwise it was failing with error 80004005. Used slmgr.vbs -upk to remove the product key just in case it caused problems. After SP1 installed I installed modded Vista Loader 2.0 again, and it is activated.

 

Could you post your modded Vistaloader please

 

as z00ps00p said:

You can simply take VL 2.0, unpack it, open CMD, navigate to the folder with extracted files and type:
install dell
And you are done.