Ok, this is too weird. I have a T60 that I put a stand alone version of Vista Enterprise on not knowing the problems i would have activating. I have an MSDN license and figured i'd be ok since i had a key. Anyway, within 2 weeks, it has expired, and will not activate, and will not let me boot into windows anymore. The only thing i can do is enter a new key. I want to reformat and put on Vista Ultimate or even XP for that matter. I tried booting to a CD, and it ignores any disk i put in. I force it to boot to CD, and it bypasses it after checking it. I try the same thing in my XP laptop and it catches the install. These are SATA drives btw. I have a SATA ultrabay drive so i put the T60 SATA drive into the ultrabay, and put that in another laptop so i can format it. I format it, and now it boots and gives me a blinking cursor even when i put the XP CD drive back in. It ignores it. Thought it was the laptop booting to the CD drive until the next situation occurred.
I have an HP DV8000T that has SATA drives as well. Am running Vista Ultimate RTM and can't use it in a development environment. Too many security stops and i dont have time to mess with it, and want to go back to XP Media Center 2005. This laptop has a dual boot to XP, so i have both on it. Rather than go to XP like i should have and delete all the program files for Vista after unloading the Vista bootmgr, i formatted the drive. I now have the EXACT same issue as above on my T60, so i know it's not the laptop, it's something with Vista. Does Vista somehow exist outside of the hard drives on your machine? How does it know Vista was on there? If i take a vista drive from another laptop thats working, these dead machines will boot fine. If i take an XP drive and boot, it dies. They will now ONLY accept drives that are booting to Vista. HP wants me to send this back, and i'm sure IBM would want the same, but i can't be without both of the machines. Is there a way to make these laptops back to factory settings? I've never seen a laptop KNOW which OS it needs. I used to swap hard drives all the time, all makes/models without issue.
Please help, i'm so over messing with this issue.
Thanks
I have an HP DV8000T that has SATA drives as well. Am running Vista Ultimate RTM and can't use it in a development environment. Too many security stops and i dont have time to mess with it, and want to go back to XP Media Center 2005. This laptop has a dual boot to XP, so i have both on it. Rather than go to XP like i should have and delete all the program files for Vista after unloading the Vista bootmgr, i formatted the drive. I now have the EXACT same issue as above on my T60, so i know it's not the laptop, it's something with Vista. Does Vista somehow exist outside of the hard drives on your machine? How does it know Vista was on there? If i take a vista drive from another laptop thats working, these dead machines will boot fine. If i take an XP drive and boot, it dies. They will now ONLY accept drives that are booting to Vista. HP wants me to send this back, and i'm sure IBM would want the same, but i can't be without both of the machines. Is there a way to make these laptops back to factory settings? I've never seen a laptop KNOW which OS it needs. I used to swap hard drives all the time, all makes/models without issue.
Please help, i'm so over messing with this issue.
Thanks