Clean Vista install WITH NO ACTIVATION

Your computer must have vista pre-installed for a Vista upgrade DVD to be included. That DVD is what is used to do a clean install, but the key comes from the factory install itself.

 

I have the tx1120us, is there a driver for the touch screen or will it automatically do inputs again? I don't see a folder for the Tablet PC stuff in the SwSetup folder. And what's the name of the folder for the verisoft fingerprint reader?

 

I don't know about the touch screen. Check HPs driver download site for the drivers for your system. I would be surprised if they are not listed there. They might also be built-in to Vista.

The fingerprint software is probably in SWsetup somewhere, but I don't have an x500 system yet, so I can't say for sure.

You can always try it out and if you don't get everything, use the restore disc to get it back to the way it was. (Remember to back up all your data first)

 

Alright thanks, that's what i thought too, use the restore disc if i get stuck.

 

The drivers for the fingerprint drivers is located in one of the misc directories in SWSETUP, the fingerprint software is not located in the SWSETUP directory but can be download from HP at:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/...softwareitem=ob-49006-1&jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

 

I used a friend's retail disc to install clean and it worked fine.

I contacted HP about getting an Anytime Upgrade DVD and they told me to contact Microsoft since they only offer it with models that come with Vista Ultimate installed. Mine has Vista Premium, so no disc.

I'm going to contact Microsoft now...

 

My new DV2500t doesn't have a folder named OEMCert.... what gives? Please help, thanks

 

I would first like to thank orev for the post and everyone else for their replies. This is all pretty new and unfamiliar to me, so this thread has been very helpful and informative.

I recently purchased a dv9000 and am looking into do a clean install of vista. I just want to make sure that I get it right...and I have made the recovery discs in case I mess things up. When reading all the entries in this thread, I have a few questions.

1) Someone mentioned having to extend the Primary if you delete the second partition. I don't exactly know what this means, but if I go with option #3 (Delete Disk 0 Partition 1, then delete Disk 0 Partition 2. Then make a New partition using all the space on the disk.), do I still need to extend something? I would like to use all the space without having any partitions.

2) I've copied over the SWSetup folder, but I am nervous about installing drivers. It seems as if Vista will install or update most of them by itself, but what is the best way to install the rest. Each folder seems to have several files and I want to make sure that I am clicking/selecting the correct file. I am hesitant about downloading drivers from HP, since so many people seem to complain about how outdated the HP website. Does the SWSetup folder have everything that I would need?

3) Any issues with the Conexant audio drivers? I read some other forums about driver issues with Vista, but it seems to apply to discontinued or older HP and Compaq models. Also, which folder contains the Conexant audio drivers?

4) What can I do to make sure that all the drivers have been installed (and successfully)? I just want to make sure that I did not miss anything.

Sorry if my questions are unsophisticated...this is very new to me and seems like the only real way to get rid of all that HP bloatware. Any and all advice and suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

You would only need to extend the C: partition if you did not first delete the recovery partition, but then changed your mind and wanted to. If you delete all of the partitions, then you just need to make a new one and don't need to do any extending

SWsetup should have everything you need, but I do recommend downloading the drivers from HP. I find that for me, it makes it easier to keep track of what version of the driver I have, and also keeps me from missing something. As you can see, all of those folders have really descriptive names!

Drivers on HPs site should be the most recent. I know there was a problem with video drivers, but that's one special case. Companies are notorious for shipping older drivers with the system, with newer ones available on the site. I didn't see this as much with HP though.

I didn't have any problems with audio drivers. I played with XP on the system and that required a little playing with, but with Vista it was just a regular install.

If you go into the system control panel and bring up the device manager, you will see devices that are not working (they will have a yellow and black exclamation point). Once you don't see those any more, you know you have everything installed and working OK.

The only stupid question is one that has not been asked! Many people might have similar questions, but never speak up. It's like in the movies when everyone sees the ghost and no one says anything, then they all die.

I want to be fair to HP here and say that their bloatware isn't nearly as bad as some other companies, but it's still really nice to have a clean system.

 

Make suer you have "show hidden files" turned on and "hide operating system files" off. Also, try doing a search for *.xrm-ms files inside C:\windows. There will be a bunch of them, but it will help you track them down. Make sure the search is searching all files.

 

1) That's why you want to delete and extend. So you gain back the 10gb of space that was set aside for the restore disks data. Once you create the disks it's useless information. Unless, you have a specific reason for wanting to keep that available for some other use? I know some people like to use the virtual drive to back up to. Problem is once your up and running with all your favorite software it takes more that that amount of space to back up.

3) I actually had static in my audio before I dumped and reloaded. Unfortunately, I also did a RAM replacement about the same time (different manufacturer than before) so I'm not really sure which to attribute it to. She rocks hard now!

I'm very pleased with my machine now. Even after I added Office 2007 I feel zero noticible performance change.

 

My new dv6500t came with a program called HP Update that supposedly automatically checks once a week with HP to make sure all my drivers are up to date. I believe this is supposed to check the BIOS as well. Anyone know what specific drivers this is checking? Is it really checking all? If so, it seems it would be easy enough to just install HP Update after doing a clean install and let it update all the drivers for you (assuming network/wifi drivers are already installed).

 

Cool. Give it a try and let us know if it works.

 

my laptop came with windows mce 2005, but it was eligible for vista upgrade so i ordered one from hp.. i installed fresh copy of vista in my laptop for several time using the cd key that came with the cd, the one u stick on the bottom of ur laptop. and when i finish installing vista i just activate it, i had no problems at all. it will always activate. in my count, i think i had formatted nd installed windows vista for about 6 times already..

 

If you have a license for them, then you should be able to use it.

 

I got one more question please, my dv8372ea laptop is dead now, because it was running windows vista (trial version), but I'm not gonna back to XP, the question is, Can I use the Recovery System Disks from HP Pavilion DV9207us Laptop for my system (Pavilion dv8372ea)????? Comparing the two configurations of two systems above, they are almost the same.

thank you very much

 

Guys, NBR will not tolerate posting methods to pirate a copy of software. I just had to delete several posts that explicitly mentioned how to get more than what you paid for. If it happens again, we hand out infractions and lock this thread.

 

I didn't realize it had gone in that direction. Sorry about that. I updated the main guide to be more explicit.

 

No you cannot. Your Vista expired because you have no license, and as such you are not entitled to install it. If you want to install Vista on that laptop, you need to buy it. END OF STORY.

 

orev and AtLarge,

Thank you for your responses. I plan on doing a clean install this weekend. Hopefully, everything works out. Thanks again.

 

Great post! Thanks OREV!

I have a dv9207us and did this last night. Seems to be working well.

One question, i did delete the recovery partition on the HD. But did not do the
"extend" thingy. Is the amount of HD space the recovery partition had lost to me now?

 

If you delete both partitions, then make 1 new one that uses all of the disk space, then you don't need to deal with extend.

Extend would only be used if you deleted the recovery partition but did not delete the vista partition. This would be a strange case.

 

I don't think there's an OEMCert folder in the dv2500t. I'm just not finding any trace of it.

 

Once my dv9500 arrives, I'll see if it's on there too. Maybe they found my guide and removed it!

 

Very nice guide. It worked for me... and i'm not really too experienced with reinstalling an OS, let alone Vista.

 

orev and everyone on this thread...thank you. I followed the steps and was able to successfully complete the clean install of Vista. It definitely starts up and shuts down much more quickly...and no annoying HP pop-ups. So, thank you again. However, I do have some questions about drivers.

I read some of the other threads and it suggested that the only drivers that need to be installed are for (1) Audio, (2) Video, (3) Card Reader, and (4) Quick Play / Quick Launch. What about the other drivers? I noticed in the SWSetup folder that there are drivers for Broadcom 802.11 Network Adapter, Lightscribe, Java, Adobe Flash Player, etc. Do these need to be installed as well? I tested to see if my wireless was working...and it does...so do I not need to install the Broadcom driver?

Any idea which drivers are important? I'm confused because the laptop seems to be working fine, but I'm not sure if these additional drivers will make things better or are needed.

Also, when I installed the drivers for the Audio and Video, I noticed that each folder had additional folders inside (V32, V64, etc.) with its own setup application. Does it matter which one I choose (setup application in Audio/Video folder vs. setup application in V32 (or whatever its called) folder)?

Thanks in advance.

 

Vista includes a good number of drivers. So, its not really necessary to install all of HP's drivers. If everything is working fine I wouldnt bother about installing the HP drivers. As for as the Java and Adobe flash players - download and install the latest versions from their respective websites. Install Lightscribe only if you have a lightscribe enabled DVD/CD drive, if not that is just extra software running in the background.

The V32, V64 folder I am guessing contains 32bit/64 bit drivers respectively. HP uses different revisions of the audio cards in many notebooks, so they might have included drivers for all of these devices in the SWSetup folder.

 

miner...thanks for the info. This is starting to make more sense to me now. I'll go with the "if it ain't broke...don't fix it rule." Thanks again.

 

I think I may have gone a stray....everythign worked as planned, but when I entered the :

cscript /nologo oem-install.vbs oem-cert.xrm-ms [product key]

I got no confirmation. I checked the serial in my os now with magical jellybean and the serial I have shows up, but the 30 day trial is still active in system...maybe I wrote it out wrong in the command prompt? I imagine those spaces are supposed to be used, and hyphens are necessary for the product key?

help clarifying is appreciated.

 

try not using brackets [] on the product key... if i remember correctly i did this and it didn't work until i removed the brackets.

 

Excellent guide. Worked flawlessly!

 

I can't find OEMCert on my brand new DV2500 either. Has anyone been able to?

 

Will this method work for me?

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=5932
(Installing Vista twice from the upgrade CD, activating the second time?)

If so any idea which product key I would use? Bottom of the laptop? The one found in the control panel? Or something dug up with one of the programs in this thread?

I already made recovery discs, so the worst thing that could happen would just be starting over with those again right....?

 

thanks dude, it completely works for my laptop.

 

Sure, you could do that, but why would you want to? If you really want to spend 2x as long doing the install, then have a system with some garbage left on the drive instead of a clean install, go ahead .

I don't really see a reason why you would want to do that (based on what's in this guide), and I can't really speculate which serials you would use to make it work.

There's always the recovery disks, so yes, you can recover. Just make sure you backup your data!

 

Oh I didn't want to do it. My new DV2500 doesn't have an OEMCert folder. Oh well. It worked. What junk would be left? I deleted the windows.old directory?

 

If you used the serial on the bottom of your laptop, it should work fine the first time without going through the 2nd reinstall for the "upgrade trick". That trick really shouldn't come into play here at all. If you use the serial on the sticker, the main difference is you'll need to activate somehow, either on the Internet or by calling Microsoft.

 

Nice guide and it will definitely come in handy when I get my new lappy. Boomarked.

 

Anyone know if this method will work (or has worked) for the dv2000z series (specifically, dv2310us)? Thanks

 

I got my dv9500 today and its not there???? and no anytime upgrade disc

 

Some news for people having trouble with the newer laptops (dvx500 series). HP did make some changes, so the method listed in the guide won't work because there's no more OEMcert folder.

I'm working on this and should have something soon.

If you didn't get an Anytime Upgrade DVD, I won't be able to help with that - but I can tell you it's pretty much the same as a retail DVD.

 

Is it necessary to do this at all on HPs? My understanding is th at on Dells, the copy of Vista you get is tied to the Dell BIOS, so it's never necessary to activate it (you can reinstall on the same system as much as you want, same as you could with XP). Doesn't that work the same way on all the other big OEMs like HP, Sony, Toshiba, etc.?

 

In the old days when just a product key was needed, that might have been the case. However, with Vista you need a signed certificate to activate the system. For OEMs (HP, Dell, etc...), there is information within the BIOS that is a component of the system, but you still need a product key and an activation certificate. That needs to come from Microsoft. On OEM systems, that key is preinstalled so you don't need to worry about it, unless you do a clean install.

 

I'm honestly fairly certain this isn't the case with Dell's hardware that ships with Vista. There were threads on it over in their forums, and several people confirmed you didn't, including a moderator (who got trained on it, and is actually surprisingly knowledgeable about other stuff).

So I can't say first hand, but the info I've gathered seems to indicate it's activated just be installing it on the system it came with. I figured that would be true for all the big OEMs (unless it really isn't true about Dell either...)

 

OK. I have read it all (here and elsewhere.)

HP DV6335se windows vista home premium.
As such I have no physical CD to do any clean installs from.
I tried to burn the recovery CD's (the info on how to do it is wrong for this PC, BTW.) The process almost completes DVD 1 then I get an error saying there is something wrong with the CD (dreaded error 20 IIRC).

finally, I found a recovery plan on the main menu and it is putting a new factory image on my PC. However, I can't do the clean install like everyone else can. Oh well.. what can you do...

 

Thanks OREV! The procedure worked flawlessly for me. Now I am running on a clean Vista install on my dv9207us from CompUSA. Quickplay and all the other stuff are working fine after driver re-install. I did remove partition 0 and 1 and recreated a new partition 0 with the full capacity of the hdd. Thanks again!

 

There is also no OEMCert folder on my new DV6500T. I hope you come out with a new guide soon Orev! Thanks for your hard work.

 

Seriously guys, I don't mean to barge in here, but are you SURE you need to do all this fancy stuff? I've confirmed neither Dell nor Sony handles it this way-you just reinstall using the included media and it's tied to the BIOS without activation.

 

Can anyone who haven't done this yet confirm what they find in the Monitor category under Device Manager? I just noticed that it says Generic Plug and Play Monitor. But on the display device I still see the Nvidia GPU. I'm not having issues with it.. just curious as to why it says Generic PnP. Also the HP Webcam also shows USB2.0 Camera or something to that extent.

 

On my system using the HP image (unclean install), the monitor is "Generic PnP Monitor". On most systems, that's what the monitor shows up as all the time.