Scott Mueller's Upgrading and Repairing PCs Forum

I don't use the home version of XP but my father about a year ago purchased a retail copy of it. He told me he was having problems with his computer and decided to try and install a retail copy of windows xp. Anyway, he gave me the computer and it works fine. This was about a year ago. I just restored it from the service partition. Anyway, he said I could have the retail copy of XP Home. I haven't installed in any pc but maybe I can sell it on ebay or something. Anyway he told me he threw away the box and doesn't have the key. Do you know is there anyway I could get a key for this cd?. Not that I need it or anything but hey, its free....

In order to be saleable, you need the original hologram CD along with the COA (Certificate of Authenticity), which of course contains the key. The disc by itself is the same as any other XP Home disc, and is not linked to any specific key, and even the COA is not legal to sell by itself, as according to Microsoft, "The Anti-Counterfeiting Act of 2003 makes it a criminal offense for dishonest resellers to distribute stand-alone COA labels.": http://www.microsoft.com/resources/howt ... =en&pg=coa

Prior to reloading from the service partition, you might have been able to retreive the 25-digit retail XP Home key number using a program like the Magical Jellybean Keyfinder: http://www.magicaljellybean.com

Unfortunately once you restored from the service partition, that data was wiped out, and was replaced with the SLP (System Locked Pre-installation) key used on the pre-installed version, which won't work with a retail disc. But that doesn't really matter anyway, since even if you had written down or could somehow retrieve the lost retail key number, it is still unsaleable without *both* the COA and hologram disc. Scott.

Oh well, it makes for a good frisbee.