Is it possible to put back win xp home by removing win xp prof 1

[porabai]

Hello All,

A friend of mine had original windows xp home and when her computer is down sent the cpu for repairs and there the guy had lost the hard drive and inorder to retrieve loaded windows xp professional (his copy) to make it workable. the system came back to my friend. She wanted to upgrade to FIESTA now but since hers is not legal win xp professional. she is trying to load back her win xp home and wanted to upgrade to FIESTA so that she wont have any problem of upgrading. is it possible to overwrite the xp home over the professinal. I know its possible to upgrade from xphome to xp prof. the other alternative i know is to reformat the hard drive and load the XP home as a fresh.

I would like to avoid formatting and just load the xp home by overwriting xp prof.

Any help will be truly appreciated and thanks for your help in advance.

 

[ASG0856]

I take it you mean she wants to upgrade to Vista. I dont know if Vista checks with MS about the legality of the Operating System or just reads straight from the Hard Drive. If the latter, why bother, Vista will install over the top. One presumes that the machine would be disconnected from the Internet at install time, so short of a phone call, it couldn't do the former.
If, in the future, she needs to reinstall Vista post a re format or Hard drive replacement, then she should still have her original XP Home disk to act as the authority for the Vista Upgrade

 

[smah]

Vista upgrade will require a validated qualifying OS to bein installed. Vista upgrade can not be done as a clean install as was commonly done with XP.

 

[ASG0856]

Smah, if not connected to the internet, does it then require a call to MS? One assumes (perhaps wrongly) she is using the computer. Therefore the Operating system has been activated and validated.

On the second point, then all that would be required would be to install XP home, then go straight to the Vista upgrade (30 mins).

 

[smah]

I can't remember exactly how it goes, but validation of the existing OS occurs during the upgrade. I believe that this happens as part of the upgrade installation - no internet required. It's similar to the way validation is required to install Defender or something similar on XP. If the repair shop installed xp pro, it very likely won't validate.

Yes, a legitimate Home intsallation should upgrade without a hitch, but it will need to be installed - you can't just pop in the 'qualifying media' as you could with xp.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/upgradeinfo.mspx

 

[porabai]

Thank you all for the updates. I totally agree to have legal version on the computer while upgrading to VISTA to avoid further problems. I know i can't directly upgrade to windows xp home from xp professional. Usually when you have win xp home u just put the xp prof cd and updates can be done from home to professional(lower version to higher version) but this case was other way from XP prof to XP home.

i can tell her to reformat her hard drive and reload freshly the win xp home thru her legal cd. But the question was can she do with her xp home to revert back to home from xp prof.

thanks once again..

 

[smah]

I don't believe that she will be able to, but I have no way to check. If the XP Pro installation was done as an upgrade, there might be an option to remove it in Add & Remove Programs (some older versions of Windows did this, but I suspect XP doesn't). If it was done as a new installation, this is a moot point because there will way to dowgrade. In either case, the best way to go is backup & clean install XP Home.

 

[porabai]

thanks Smah. I totally agree with you. I know the bestway is backup and clean install xp home.
Thanks once again.. to everyone who responded with their ideas/suggestions.

 

[smah]

I hate it when I miss words in such a way that what I wrote doesn't make sense.....

...because there will be no way to dowgrade...