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Awhile back I had someone that gave me an old HP Pavilion a604x PC. They had wiped the HD that had been running XP Home Edition. I have had everything from XP Pro to W7 and even Linux on this thing but I had never been able to get my hands on an XP Home Edition OEM SP2 until today.
Bottom line is this. Their is an awful lot of info on the internet on how to do this but most of it is just info. In order to get XP Home or XP Pro reactivated when reinstalling from scratch this is what I did. Most of these machines are OEM with the OS installed through volume license. The important thing here is to match the product key on the sticker with an OEM ISO whether it be XP Home or XP Pro, one will not work for the other. In my case I found an XP Home SP2 ISO and downloaded and burned a bootable CD, I could not even get an XP Home SP3 ISO to activate.http://downloads.jmay.us/Downloads/WindowsXPHomeSP2.aspx this is where I downloaded my ISO from.
Going to donate this old PC to the Church to run Libre Office for their bookkeeping.
if you lived closer to me Daniel, I have a vast collection of the cd's for all the Os's. I would've shared them with you. Kudos for going on a fact finding mission and figuring this out. Sending you a virtual high 5.
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Thanks Sherri!!!! The old PC is doing fine and is activated and running with the original product key. Wish I had known you could have copied one and mailed it. One lives and learns.
Oddly enough I have XP Pro and Home original packs and disks I bought when XP first came out. Actually they are upgrades in that you need to have your original Win98 disk handy to install.
Over the years I've used these disks on countless PCs and since XP support finished, it activates immediately.
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