A friend has xp pro installed from what we believe was a copy cd. He now has a genuine disc with product key.Should we re-install using this new disc, we don't want to format the disk,so can we just re-install and then activate using the new product key?don't want to risk losing any programs,files etc.
I believe the best way would to be to backup your important data, format and re-install! This is the only way to ensure the pirated copy is completely gone!
Pirate copies are only the corporate editions with a key. You can reinstall it over the copy, or you can do a repair install if you want and just use the new genuine product key. Apart from that, thats the only difference between normal and pirate.
Of course, if it's a pirated copy downloaded from P2P networks, it could be a poisoned copy (i.e. preinstalled with a lovely rootkit). If you don't know the origin of the disc, it's a good idea to reinstall from scratch.
Actually it takes up exactly the same amount of hard disk space, seeing as installing over a previous installation really only resets certain parts of it, rather than adding a whole new installation. Because Windows will not allow there to be another version of Windows installed on the same hard drive, it's just the way it's coded. Although you can sneak Linux in as well as having XP.
the new install will only overwrite the existing files..if there are any additional files to be installed then this will require more disk space..bt approx the same space is taken
