A question on the legality of using someone else's XP disc

Tom Dunne · 13-11-2007 9:37pm #1

Ok, here's the story.

Fixing a Sony laptop for a friend and it has gone horribly wrong. Long story, but don't ever offer to replace a dead hard-drive on a Sony laptop.

Anyway, since the drive is dead, I have no recovery discs for the machine, they restore partition was on the dead hard-drive. Given that the XP serial number is on a sticker on the bottom of the laptop, can I just borrow another person's XP disc and use the laptop's serial number. Is that legal?

If it is, can somebody loan me an XP disc?

Pacifico · 13-11-2007 9:38pm

You would assume so. The sticker is your license for XP

Jimbo · 13-11-2007 9:41pm

I thought the licence keys only work with the discs they come with??

Capt'n Midnight · 13-11-2007 9:42pm

if the sticker says pro then you've to use pro / if it says home you've to use home

one big problem is that a HP or dell cd won't work because its locked to hp or dell BIOS's

Stephen · 13-11-2007 10:00pm

Afaik OEM licence keys won't work on retail CD's either so if its an OEM licence (as it would be in this case) you need to get an OEM disc. I have had some success using an OEM XP Home disc that came with an Aldi Gericom laptop on Compaq and Dell machines with their respective keys.

A question on the legality of using someone else's XP disc

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