How to switch a live/working XP system from VL to oem or from oem to another oem?

I have an IBM T42 with a VL Windows XP. How would i go about switching this to an OEM and keep the OS working? Can that be done?

And if that can be done, can you switch a working XP install that is already set up as oem to another manufacturer oem?

For example, if I get this T42 to work as an OEM IBM install. Could I then ghost the image to say a Dell (assuming i have the correct controller drivers alareadu installed) and once it's ghosted over, then swap out the necessary oem files to now make it pre-activated under a Dell SLP?

I am interested in this because I have created a hardware independent Win XP image that I can ghost to multiple different systems, and it works just fine. Problem is, I built it on a T42 with using a XP OEM CD that I created with the info from this site. So it works great on multiple IBM/Lenovo systems, but if I ghost it to Dell, and several other manufacturers, while the system boots just fine, it's (of course) no longer genuine, and is not activated.

So I was hoping to then be able to replace whatever files are needed in order to turn this into a pre-activated oem Dell image.

Thanks for any help!

 

How to manually switch XP's oem info to another brand to keep system activated

I did find that sticky page a few days ago, and it was helpful. The tool works really well, and I was able to switch my oem IBM install into an oem Dell install.

However, my issue is that I would like to be able to do this myself, without using the tool. (so that I can script it later).

As far as I can tell, the tool simply copies over the 4 oembios.* files that you provide based on the oem system you are trying to activate (and I'm not sure if you need the pidgen.dll and dpcdll.dll file, but I did copy over those as well.

It also changes the SystemID (your CD key essentially) to one appropriate for your selected oem.

Problem is I did all of this manually, and the system won't activate. That picture still appears in the lower right hand corner of Windows stating this copy of Windows is not activated. I even tried using the reg file that this tool creates, and simply writing that into the registry, in case I missed something the first time. But that didn't work either.

Would anybody have any input on how this can be done manually?

Thanks!

 

Thanks azlvda! I've never heard of Dobbelina's tool, so thanks for the heads up.

I downloaded it and took a good look at it. It seems simple enough, but to my surprise if I did all the steps manually, it does not work. That makes no sense to me.

Basically, all this tool does is replace the 4 oembios.* files under your system32 folder and the subfolder CATROOT by using the WFPREPLACE.exe tool. It also removes the system attribute from these files (the live ones in the system32 folder). Once the new correct oem versions are copied in place, it simply re adds the system attribute to the one file under the CATROOT folder. I'm surprised the others do not have the system attritube returned, but what the heck, it seems to work if you use the tool.

After that, the only thing left to do is the run the batch file that is specific to your oem. The only relevent thing that this batch file does is to put in the CD-key appropriate to the oem. I'm not even sure that is needed, but I did it anyways. I even used the batch file from Dobbelina's script, I did not wite a new one.

But it does not work!!! Unless I use the entire tool, this does not work, and I don't understand why. Anybody know what I am missing? I would sure appreciate a helpful hint! It's bugging me because this is a really simply thing, yet it just does not work for me.

Thanks!

 

Never mind, I figured it out! I am running my script via Auto IT, and I had one little typo, which was causing the 4 oembios.* files to not expand from their compessed versions.

Ok, it works now! Thanks again azlvda for your help, that one suggestion of Dobbelina's script is all it took to make this possible!

 

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