I've read many posts that say "I've lost my original CD" and just shook my head and wondered what sort of idiot could possible lose the original installation disk. Seems I'm one of those idiots. I had an old PC that was running Windows 2000 and Oracle 9i. It was from a company I used to work for long ago, and to be honest, it really had no use, but I like the case, so I put it in the closet and forgot about it. It was an IDE motherboard so nothing I had would work with it. It was just taking up a lot of space so I took it to the eRecycle place. But did I open the case up to see if there was anything in it that I might salvage. Nooooo, I knew that there was nothing in there that was worth anything. I had used hard drive caddies and the slots were empty, nothing to see here, move along. To make a long story short, I was doing a bit of house cleaning and couldn't locate the original Windows 2000 installation disk. I looked everywhere, and I mean everywhere. No way I would have thrown it out. And then it hit me. I did throw it out. An old habit of mine was to leave the installation disks in the PC that they were installed on. Comes from the old days where every installation was done individually on each PC. Rather than try to keep track of which software went with which PC, it was just easier to throw all the stuff inside the PC. That way you knew what went where. So some dweeb at the eRecycling center is going to open up that case and say, "hmm some idiot left an original CD, COA, and manual of Windows 2000 inside this case." And of course, that idiot would be me. So off I went hunting for a replacement disk. Thanks to Urie a few posts up, I went to WinWorld (can't post links yet) and found Windows 2000 SP4. After I downloaded it, and ran 7zip to extract the ISO I checked the SHA1 with NirSoft's HashMyFiles SHA1: 4A4569B303163A53927109954A9F30E89CFEAD29 and it matched exactly with the original hash posed in the first post of this thread. Using ImgBurn I copied the ISO to a CD an booted with it, and installed it to a VM. I tried to use Oracle's VirtualBox but for some reason it didn't work. VMWare's product worked flawlessly, and I had no trouble installing Windows 2000 in the VMWare's virtual machine. The only thing that I couldn't figure out was the screen resolution. It was fubar, in a small window, and VMWare barked at me when I went to make it full screen. NBD, but annoying. Then came the "enter the CD Key" part of the install. I powered up the spare hard drive with the original installation of Windows 2000 and Belarc and it gave me the generic key, that didn't work. So I went back to WinWorld and checked out some of the keys that they had posted. Most didn't work, but I found a couple that did. At least now I have something that I can use to repair the original installation should I need to. The obvious question is why I would want to run Windows 2000 in the first place. Well, along with Oracle 9i database there's Internet Information Server, and the Crystal Reports Web component running against the Oracle database. To say nothing of the 10 years or so of data that's stored in the Oracle Database that I would have to re-import. The sensible thing to do would be to migrate it to XP, because Oracle 9i won't work with newer version of Windows. That would mean I would have to upgrade Oracle, Crystal, and I just didn't want to go through the agony, especially since the company was bought out long ago, and the entire system is pretty much antiquated. I just wanted to keep the it around. Kinda like an old pair of shoes, if you know what I mean. Kinda reminds me of the good old days..... .
Oops, Forum noob here. I thought it would be OK, since I just prettied up what was over at WinWorld. I see that Urie already removed them. Sorry for the transgression. I'll not do it again.