[bigsue]

Hello. A friend of mine gave me their HP laptop but no original CD's for it. I need to restore the laptop to it's original state but only own some Dell OEM Windows XP CD's. It apparently doesn't like them and won't boot to them. Is there a way to boot up this HP laptop and restore it using the Dell CD's I have? Or any other way that you can think of?

Thanks.

[Byteman]

No, they check if they are actually being used along with a Dell motherboard (system)

What I strongly reccommend is>

www.computersurgeons.com <<<to purchase for about $27 a set of official HP Recovery disks for your HP

There type in the model (you may have to look underneath for the actual exact model ID, because on the top it shows just the Family of HP computer you have.

Then I can point you to the specific instructions at the HP support pages for your machine, so you read about how to do the Recovery correctly.

[bigsue]

That's what I thought. Ok thanks for the advice.

[Byteman]

There is also a chance that the Recovery Partition still exists on that laptop and that you could use that to make the Recovery.

Usually, at startup you press F10,

Use the link >> http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/d...cname=bph07145

Read it all, but for your present case, before you get CDs for it, you could try Recovering during startup