My wife’s PC was around 7 years old, running XP Professional. While functioning fine, it was pretty slow. This past weekend I installed a new motherboard, a quad core Intel i5 CPU, 8 GB RAM and used her older 1/2 GB hard drives. After powering it up and setting a few things in the BIOS, I turned on RAID.
This, of course, wiped out both hard drives. Since I had purchased Windows 7 Home Upgrade, I went ahead with the install, fully expecting the installation program to ask for the original XP disk for upgrade verification.
I’m here to tell you that Microsoft left that little bit out of the installation program. It installed beautifully but will not let me enter the product key, insisting that it was not an upgrade installation.
I was going to re-install XP and start over, but with the SATA drives, XP expects a third party SATA driver to be installed so it can correctly access the hard drives. Since my wife PC lost the floppy drive some years ago (never used) and XP installation insists on reading the driver via a floppy drive, that option was not possible.
After numerous calls to various Microsoft departments, they’ve agreed to sell me a clean install package for $30 more, after I gave them the SKU from the upgrade product.
If only the installation process would have asked for the XP disk, I wouldn’t have had to waste a bunch of time and pay for an upgrade to the upgrade. How lame is that.
