JT wrote:
Paul wrote:
wrote:
In the recent thread "Lenovo T43 (with XP) Wont Power On", I
mentioned that my old Lenovo T43 died. I have given up on fixing
that computer since it's obvious the motherboard is shot.
I bought an identical T43 from ebay, and it is identical, except it
came with 1gb RAM (my old one had 512mb RAM), and a larger HDD.
(80gb, instead of 40gb).
The computer arrived and had XP Pro SP3 installed. That booted up
immediately, and the computer works fine.
The plan was to insert my old HDD, so I could use use it as I had it
configured, with all my software ready to go. I pulled out the
new HDD, and put in the one from my old computer. It refuses to
boot.
That old drive has XP Pro SP3 on it as well.
In Normal Mode it just went to a blank screen and hung there. I get
a whole screen of words saying there are hardware changes. (No
****). But it's the same model of computer with the only difference
being double the RAM.
You moved a System Builder (OEM) WinXP install from one
machine to another. Kablooie. The difference in the
NIC MAC address should be enough to tip it over.
If both disks were Lenovo Royalty OS installs, that
would not have happened. Those are SLIC activated,
and all they're supposed to check for, is whether
the correct BIOS SLIC table is present.
When playing with computers in this way (doing "spit
swaps"), always back up the drive before you put
it in the other computer. I don't know how many
times my bacon was saved, by having a backup
for a "do-over".
*******
The "official" repair route, might be a Repair Install.
Put the old disk in the new computer, boot with the
WinXP SP3 installer CD, and do the Repair Install from
there.
A Repair Install keeps Program files and User data.
You will have to re-install the drivers. You will
have to redo all the Windows Updates since SP3.
In addition, if the original setup had an "advanced"
version of Internet Explorer, you're supposed to
remove that before Repairing. Since that isn't
possible in this case, you install the advanced version
of Internet Explorer after the Repair, and "hope
for the best".
You will also need a valid license key for the
Repair Install. The process isn't clever enough
to "keep" the old key.
Maybe someone else knows of a "magic" way to fix
your situation. I don't know of a way which is less work.
Using the new disk is certainly attractive, but
you'll have to reinstall Office or whatever.
And that might not be a lot of fun either.
Paul
My company ordered 50 Dell desktop computer (Same model)
I proceeded to build a "Ghost" image of Windows XP to deploy
to all 50 computers. (All needed application were installed on the
Reminds me of an issue I had with Dell ~15 years ago.
image) Imagine my surprise that about 1/2 of the units blue screened
after imaging. After much troubleshooting it was determined that these
identical model desktops were not quite identical.
Dell informed us that they make no promise that the systems would
contain the same hardware. Different chipsets, NIC's, video cards etc...
Basically they used parts from a bin and when that bin was empty... on
to the next bin (Which may or may not contain the same hardware.)
I was furious but got nowhere with Dell tech support.
I had to install and configure most of the 50 PC's manually.
Those were the last Dell computers we ever purchased.
I'm assuming thats what happened to OP.
Same model #'s does not necessarily mean identical hardware.
I still hate Dell!
JT
I agree. There are Dell desktops like that, where the model
number is the same for AMD and Intel processor machines.
Everything would be different on the motherboard. And I
don't understand how this practice helps anyone particularly.
I would expect at least some laptop model was done
the same way.
This also happens on some products at your computer store.
For example, one company was shipping a Marvell NIC in a
box (good), and decided to start putting RealTek NICs
(the one with the interrupt problem) in the same box.
Um, that's not very nice.
But for Lenovo, I don't recollect any stories like
that. I think they were a bit more consistent on
SKU versus design.
Every company slips up, even when they seem to have
a policy and paper trail that precludes it. Kingston
used to provide datasheets for their DIMMs, and the
datasheet would nail down the details (8 chips or 16 chips
on the DIMM). But at one point, they were playing the market,
and two sizes of chip were very close to the same price.
And when you bought what was supposed to be a compatible
DIMM using their web selector, if you used that
part number, sometimes you got the 8 chip DIMM (bad)
or the 16 chip DIMM (good). And one of those was
too dense to be compatible (chipset needed one more
address bit on memory bus). And all this, when the product
is backed by a datasheet that says the DIMM has
16 chips.
In the case of the OPs problem, if you have
a black screen with a blinking cursor, I don't
know of a way at that point, to issue some sort
of SLUI or slmgr command to enter another
license key or re-activate. I'm not always
convinced either, that the issue is a driver,
as this sort of thing can happen when transferring
between two Intel Southbridges (same storage port
standard). You should get a STOP code and
"Inaccessible Boot Volume", if the disk driver
wasn't appropriate (wrong mode in BIOS etc).
So when I've had what appeared to be activation-related
freezes here, I couldn't see an easy way to get the
machine upright again.
Paul