Reformatting a W7J with my own WinXP cds

Hey guys,

A friend of mine recently bought an Asus W7J and I started reading about everyone converting from FAT32 to NTFS partitions. Rather than going through the conversion process, I would like to reformat from a clean WinXP install instead of the recovery cds and go straight to NTFS. Can anyone tell me for sure if the Product Key on the bottom will work with a normal XP installation cd?

The reason I'm not using the key that came with the XP installation cd is that it's in use on another computer. I just want to use the XP install cds to avoid the Asus recovery junk.

Thanks in advance,
Cary

 

Okay, so I found a post by Burn_Knuckle talking about using the retail XP cds. I didn't realize it would be so involved! Has anyone done this and had it work for them? I don't mean to be skeptical, but I just want to make sure I don't run into any unforseen problems on a tight schedule.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=64994&page=6

Thanks so much,
Cary

 

It really isn't that involved. The method I described is a simple matter of replacing a directory, and creating a bootable CD with its contents.

The only problems that could arise to complicate things is if you are not using a retail XP cd with SP-2 integrated, or if you screw up when creating the bootable CD (a procedure for which there are countless easy to follow guides for just about every burning software known to man).

In all actuality, its as simple as replacing one file in the I386 directory and copying over the OEM info files, but I figured just replacing the entire directory eliminates any potential for misunderstanding.

 

Thanks so much for your advice. This worked like a charm.

I used this site as a guide for making the bootable cd. They even included a boot loader cd image.