i have a HP pavilion xt983 and have recently changed the motherboard. when i ran my xp recovery disc it would crash. i learnt it was from the tattoo that is on the hp installed motherboard. i have contacted hp to see if they would tell me how to tattoo the board myself but they will not. the tattoo process i have found is just programming the bios to the hp computer you have such as the model and serial # ect. the hp support rep did tell me that the recovery cd's have some type of code on them that looks for the tattoo. does anyone know of a way to tattoo or around it? it doent make sense for those of us who can work on and upgrade our on computers to have to take it to someone when we can do it ourselves.

Why in the world would you want to run a propietary OEM recovery cd on a system after you had changed it's mainboard. That is like running a DELL recovery cd on GATEWAY. You just don't do that. If you do it is a recipe for disaster. You need a full XP CD to install windows, then you can run the recovery cd to manually install your hardware drivers.