Vista upgrade

[beegeebee]

Have upgraded from XP to Vista and am agreeably pleased with the result. However, her indoors did a 'bit of cleaning' and in the process threw out my XP cd! So... if I have to reinstall Vista, does this mean I have to purchase either another copy of XP or a full version of Vista? I do have a cd with a slipstream of my Xp system but would that suffice/?
Your help would be greatly appreciated. B

[gen2]

Your slipstreamed XP CD will not work since if you try to re-install from it, it will tell you there is already a more recent version installed and refuse to continue.

I had that problem with my son's PC which had XP pre-installed and came with a backup CD that was XP slipstreamed with Service Pack 1b. Since then he had upgraded with Service Pack 2 and the CD was useless. You cannot slipstream newer upgrades with a CD that has already been slipstreamed. You have to go back to an original XP and slipstream it with the most recent updates (in my case SP2) and then use that version.

[ChuckFickens]

errrrr, the official answer... yes

The unofficial answer, no, you can use your upgrade cd to do a clean install of vista :)

to do this you have to install it twice though, the first time turning off all the automatic updates and not entering the product key, as it's not an update at this point the registration and the updates would fail.

Then as soon as it is finished installing start the install again and once again turn of the automatic update and don't enter the key(your not meant to upgrade vista to vista so they would fail again), but the second time it completes the install it will think it's done an upgrade and let you register it and turn the updates on and you have a clean install from your upgrade CD

Don't tell anyone I told you how to do this though :)

OH and make a note of this or print it of :)

Now don't anybody go using this info in the wrong way now!!

[rojash]

Don't worry - this solution is widely published on the web - including a number of legal opinions which all state that it is probably perfectly legal. I used the process myself to perform a clean install from my upgrade disk.

[beegeebee]

gen2; ChuckFickens and Rojash. Thanks guys, sanity restored it would seem! Will now rest easy until the day I have to do a reinstall. Many thnaks to the three of you. B