I have a pc my sister gave me – it had XP installed. Trouble is the hard drive crashed and burned – no data recovery possible.
The XP product sticker is nowhere to be found. I have a OEM dell reinstallation disk, but no partition from which to recover. Tried scanning the crashed drive, but no files can be seen.
I had a spare copy of Windows 2K so I put in on the machine, but would like to use XP. My questions are:
If I do an installation of XP from the recovery disk (green Dell OEM) can it be activated? Since Microsoft seems to have access to the XP product I’d previously had on the machine. Can/will Microsoft give me the XP license number? The machine a Dell has the original motherboard, just the hard drive has been replaced. Would I be ahead to place the original drive back in, so that Microsoft sees that piece of hardware too?
It seems like this should work both ways. Since I had a legitimate software package installed, they should be able to provide it for my use on the machine for which it was originally licensed.
Any suggestions on how I go about this? Can I installed XP and get help from Microsoft to recover my license number?