raylopez99

On Nov 23, 4:19 pm, raylopez99 <raylope...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Bought the above hardware very very cheap (Asia)--about 20% of the US
> price. The seller managed to make it work, using a legal copy of
> Windows Vista Ultimate. But he had problems doing so. I am pretty
> experienced (about a half dozen systems built from scratch), so I
> figured no problem. But the first hint of a problem was when trying
> to load Windows 2000 from the reformatted (clean) HD--won't work
> (supposed "invalid key" problem, not true). Then Windows XP, using
> legal copies of the same, the same message "Invalid Key" (or along
> those lines). But the keys are not invalid. So something on the boot
> sector of the HD is corrupt I surmise.

I meant "load Windows 2000 onto the clean HD", using a CD of the same,
not "from" the HD.

Also what's weird is that I know this system can work, since the
seller had a legal copy of Windows Ultimate and made it work (after a
lot of reboots and fiddling to be sure).

But the main question is: not how to make Vista Ultimate work on this
particular system necessarily, but how to get *ANY OS* to load onto
this system (even Linux!). Tommorrow I will play around with Windows
98 and even DOS in an attempt to achieve this goal. And yes, Linux-
nuts, please do tell me of a distro to try...like I said I do have a
non-bootable (!) CD of Mandriva 2007, and "TinyLinux" (or somesuch
name) somewhere as well. I need a nice step by step HowTo (but no
need to be too specific since I'm not a rank beginner).

Please advise.

RL