Your hard disk
crashed, and without a full backup (see Chapter 6), you need to rebuild your
system. Or perhaps you??™ve decided against upgrading XP directly to avoid
passing on six years of accumulated junk to your new operating system.
Either way, you??™ve undoubtedly discovered that your upgrade disc won??™t
install if it can??™t find an eligible Windows installation to upgrade.
Figure 1-2. Click the ???Drive options??? link to show these drive preparation and partition
editing tools
Install Windows Vista | 11
Get Started with
Windows Vista
In this scenario, Microsoft suggests that you install XP and then install Vista
over it. Not bloody likely.
Instead, just follow these steps to get a fresh Vista installation from an
upgrade disc:
1. Use your Vista disc to boot your PC, as described in ???Install Vista on a
New (Clean) System.???
2. When setup loads, click Install now and proceed normally.
3. When prompted for the product key, leave the field blank, and just click
Next.
4. Without the key, setup will ask you which edition of Vista you??™d like to
install; make sure you choose the edition you??™ve actually purchased.
5. When setup is complete, you??™ll be operating in the 30-day evaluation
period, but you won??™t be able to activate Vista until you enter your
product key.
To enter the product key, open a Command Prompt window in administrator
mode, as explained in ???Control User Account Control??? in
Chapter 8, and then type this at the prompt:
cscript \windows\system32\slmgr.
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