Windoze from a branded system recovery DVD ?

Somebody gave me a heap of "system recovery" DVDs from various big-brand PCs.
They contain the Windows XP/Vista/7 to reinstall after some unhappy event.
I noticed they are typically labelled

Professional SP1 32-bit
only for use on a brand X PC

They never say what model. I thought they were customised to the specific PC.
So if you got one of these from say a Sandy Bridge PC, would it install to
a Nehalem of same brand?

wrote:
Somebody gave me a heap of "system recovery" DVDs from various big-brand PCs.
They contain the Windows XP/Vista/7 to reinstall after some unhappy event.
I noticed they are typically labelled

Professional SP1 32-bit
only for use on a brand X PC

They never say what model. I thought they were customised to the specific PC.
So if you got one of these from say a Sandy Bridge PC, would it install to
a Nehalem of same brand?

There might be driver differences.

It takes amazingly little for a "basic" install to happen.
You need a compatible disk controller operating mode.
On WinXP, compatible IDE mode works. Later OSes support
AHCI out of the box. On WinXP, this can be fixed by pressing
F6 early in the install, and offering a txtsetup.oem floppy
and applying say, an AHCI driver. Other scenarios might
include using a RAID driver for just about any flavor of
hardware. Not all RAIDs will be covered by the installer media.

Most users are worried about "activation", and whether the
OS is "genuine". The driver situation can be cleaned up
later. For example, if no video card driver is available,
the VESA fallback driver is used. Because of that driver,
you should be able to see the screen.

So you can eventually patch the thing up to a fully working
state.

A Dell with a SLIC table in the BIOS, should work
with a Dell XP/Vista/7 disc. If on the other hand,
you built a PC using a motherboard from a local
computer store, those SLIC-activated OS discs
aren't going to be of much value to you.

On OEM laptops, the video driver is the limiting factor.
The laptop LCD panel is not Plug and Play, and that's why it's
difficult to get a driver working out-of-the-box. But for
desktops, all it takes is work, to get your Dell running
an older WinXP Dell CD.

There are a few OEM discs, that have embarrassing lapses.
Some Fujitsu discs apparently install on more than one
brand of PC. But I'm not up on the details. I don't have
a pile of that stuff here to test. Many of the others
only activate on own-branded hardware.

You could attempt to look for driver packages
on the media, to guess as to what platform they
would be perfect for.

Activation on Win8/8.1/10 is handled in a different
manner, so don't expect discs from that era to be
of much use to you. The license key for OEM
machines of that era, is stored in the BIOS, instead
of a SLIC "I'm a Dell!" table. So the BIOS key only
activates the software of the same era. It's possible
the very next released Win10 DVD, will change how
that works a little bit (to enable the "Free" upgrade
to take place with less hassle).

That pile of discs you got, is mostly useless,
but you never know, maybe you can figure out
a way to use them. For example, if you needed
a copy of bootsect.exe, you might extract one
from those discs. I needed that file for the
USB key loader from Microsoft.

Paul