Not necessarily. Certain keys only work with certain images. Dell and HP are two that come to mind. If you’ve a no-name clone then you should be fine with a generic image but otherwise you should use an image from the manufacturer.
That said, you should be able to use any CD to boot into recovery mode.
It’s a Toshiba Satellite. Their BIOS mode is kinda nice. They have Icons on the bottom of the loading screen and you pick what you want to boot from after you hit F12.
Anywhoot, I booted from the BartPE disk, I see the BartPE logo, (it asked if I wanted to do some network setup, I gambled and said yes. Then it referenced an i386 folder, as a previous poster referenced. I can select stuff from the BartPE “GO” menu, but I’m not sure what to do from here.)
Help?
Any oem xp pro key will work with any oem pro xp install disk. I have done this to ever make and model PC you can imagine. Only one that was a pain was a sony vaio desktop.
Clicking “Go, Programs, System Tools, Check Disk” is a good starting bet.
I went to do just this, but when I started up the laptop, the screen didn’t light up. The computer was fine, it was running, the CD drive light was flashing appropriately, but nothing came up on the screen. I plugged in a screen into the input in the back of the laptop and still nothing came through.
It sounds like my problems are a little greater than previously anticipated.
Hmm, yeah, that’s not good. If an external monitor doesn’t work, it sounds like your graphics card. Sometimes you have to press “Fn” and then one of the F keys to switch to external monitor mode though.
They’d be sudden graphics card problems then.
Well, yeah. All happens at once, huh?
No display problems can be broken down like this…
If even the inital BIOS screen isn’t showing up (which is how your problem sounds), this pretty much rules out a software issue. If the hard drive is being accessed and it sounds like it is booting up fine otherwise, the issue is most likely the screen, GFX card, or dodgy connections on the motherboard.
Like you’ve done, the first thing to try is to plug it into another screen to rule out a fault with your laptop screen. It is possible the external monitor is dodgy, your monitor port is broken, or there’s some other random weird error, but no display on an external screen either does usually rule out a faulty laptop screen.
This leaves the GFX card or something loose/dodgy on your motherboard. It’s worth letting it cool down, blowing out the dust and giving it another try, but if it still won’t work, it might be time to take it into the shop. At least you can get Windows reinstalled at the same time!
True, but not all PCs come with OEM distributions. Dell and HP are two that come to mind: the disks they use are subtly different and their license keys will not work with an OEM disk, nor will an OEM key work with one of their disks. Been there, done that, got the tee-shirt. There’s nothing stopping you reinstalling with a standard OEM CD and standard OEM license key, mind, but you have to pay for the latter.
I have reloaded 3 dell machines this weekend using standard OEM images and regularly to this to dozens of machines a month (I own a computer shop). I have reloaded more than my share of HP machines as well and had no such problems. Only issues I have ever come across were with sony machines and that was that the drivers for several components would not work without the factory distro of the OS, the os and key loaded just fine. If they are coming with a “restore CD” that is not a windows disk and may be keyed slightly differently, but they key itself is a valid windows OEM key or its most likely a TOS violation with microsoft.