Easy to Follow Instructions on Making an XP Recovery Disk

A lot of people have been asking me this question many times, “I have Windows XP, how could I install Windows without losing all my files. The only thing I have is a Recovery Disk”. Actually, this is very simple, as long as you have a blank disk and a disk burner.

The first thing that you should do is to make a Windows XP recovery disk. If you are using FAT32, you can make a Startup diskette or a bootable CD image.

If you have your Windows XP recovery disk from your computer manufacturer, the recovery disk will copy the Windows installation files to a folder, normally to C:\Windows\I386, C:\Winnt\I386 or C:\I386. Open the Windows Explorer and search for them. But before that, make sure you have got the files EULA.txt, Winnt32.exe and Winnt.exe. All of these files have versions of Windows with different number of files. These files will be compressed, so they will have an underscore at the end of the file extension like “Shell32.dl_”

You could perform a search for the folder I386. If you have searched for it, copy the entire folder to your disk burner. Don’t change the filename of the folder and don’t make a sub folder like E:\Windows\I386. The proper name must be E:\I386. This folder usually contains 1000 to 1500 files.

Before making and using a Windows XP recovery disk, be sure to read and review its features and other information.

Now, getting the Windows CD Key is the difficult part. The platform of NT doesn?t save the CD Key in the Registration in plain text as it does on the platform of Windows 9x. It saves only the Product ID, which is not similar every time you reinstall Windows. So checking your computer case is needed. Some laptops have Windows CD Key pasted at the bottom of it. Your Windows XP recovery disk may have it on its label. If you can’t find the key, you could modify the file I386\Setupp.ini or you could download free CD key reader software for you to read the installed key, which was used to install Windows on your computer.

In Windows XP, the CD key reader software will tell you the Windows CD that you last installed. If your computer is from other manufacturers such as Dell and you haven’t reinstalled Windows yourself, the Key might not work. Other manufactures such as Dell are installing Windows to all the machines from a common Image. They use similar CD Key and this is included on the box that matches the I386 folder PID file. This is different from the common image they used.

To modify the Setupp.ini file, open it in notepad and it will appear like this:

[Pid]

ExtraData=6376796F71737A76767385CA66F124

Pid=51873OEM

Change the OEM to 270 on the Pid Value so it looks like this:

[Pid]

ExtraData=6376796F71737A76767385CA66F124

Pid=51873270

This must work on most disks. This will permit you to install Windows 2000 in your computer without a serial number. But note that this will NOT work on Windows 2003 or evaluation versions of Windows. It will only work on the earlier XP versions.