I had a failure on a storage HDD that held my old XP install, the drive hadf
failed completly. after that the machine would no longer boot up(Vista is
loaded on a seperate hard drive which is fine) i could still see install but
could not repair and diagnostics kept saying that no vista install existed.
so with no other options i reinstalled, of course this is not allowed so i
have an install that will not validate. my question is do i have to
reinstall xp then upgrade from that? i cant believe it could be that
difficult?

The upgrade version is meant to be installed ON TOP OF an existing,
qualifying operating system.

There are ways around this but I do not go into these methods. You might try
Google.

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)


"Jezza" <Jezza@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:6C1F1615-DE09-41C2-A57B-FB19A61C65B8@microsoft.com...
>I had a failure on a storage HDD that held my old XP install, the drive
>hadf
> failed completly. after that the machine would no longer boot up(Vista is
> loaded on a seperate hard drive which is fine) i could still see install
> but
> could not repair and diagnostics kept saying that no vista install
> existed.
> so with no other options i reinstalled, of course this is not allowed so i
> have an install that will not validate. my question is do i have to
> reinstall xp then upgrade from that? i cant believe it could be that
> difficult?