Installed XP over Vista, now can't boot into Vista. how do I get Vista product key?

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gojita

Limp Gawd
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Jun 5, 2003
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I just bought a laptop and I wanted to install Vista on it. I didn't know that installing XP would get rid of the Vista booter and I can't boot into Vista now. I still have the Vista directory intact and everything and I was wondering how I can retrieve my Vista key from the directory?
 
If it's like past Windows versions, you aren't going to get your key back from the installed directory, unless you have a 3rd party utility, and can boot to the OS in question. Considering you just installed Vista, you should have to key anyway, unless of course this isn't a legal version of Vista.

I'm not sure how or why you would have installed XP and still had Vista's directories intact, so you might want to explain what exactly you did. It doesn't sound like you created a separate partition for XP.

At this point, I'd either wipe the drive clean and install Vista fresh with your key (which you should have if you installed Vista already), or try something like VistaBootPro to get the drive bootable again.
 
need some more info as I don't understand what you did. Your laptop should have a restore/repair cd so you can start from a fresh install.
 
I just ended up installing Vista fresh with the Vista CD. I was hoping to use the OEM key so I wouldn't have to activate and save some time. Fresh Vista is so much better than all the stuff that was loaded from when I first got it.
 
gojita said:
I just ended up installing Vista fresh with the Vista CD. I was hoping to use the OEM key so I wouldn't have to activate and save some time. Fresh Vista is so much better than all the stuff that was loaded from when I first got it.
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Just an fyi, you still need to activate even with OEM Vista keys. The key thats on the underside of the laptop is the key thats installed on your system. If you do a fresh install, regardless of what key you use, you'll need to activate. From there you may or may not need to call MS to finish activating depending on the Activation Server's mood at the time (I know a ton of OEM keys for XP require calling to activate, regardless of how many times its been activated in the past to try to cut down on people moving OEM Windows XP licenses from machine to machine--whether this is still the case or will be the case in the future with Vista I'm not sure yet).
 
Oooska said:
Just an fyi, you still need to activate even with OEM Vista keys. The key thats on the underside of the laptop is the key thats installed on your system. If you do a fresh install, regardless of what key you use, you'll need to activate. From there you may or may not need to call MS to finish activating depending on the Activation Server's mood at the time (I know a ton of OEM keys for XP require calling to activate, regardless of how many times its been activated in the past to try to cut down on people moving OEM Windows XP licenses from machine to machine--whether this is still the case or will be the case in the future with Vista I'm not sure yet).
Click to expand...

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=119587
That's the link I used. The activation is done with a script.

I forgot to post the solution I used to boot back into Vista. I used easy BCD to change the bootloader
 
I remember when I had to activate XP a few months ago, I had to call in and it took a while to read off the numbers and then get the numbers back to me. Using an OEM key I don't have to worry about any of this.

I used this: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=119587

A stock computer comes with a script in the \Windows\OEMCart folder that only a comp of your exact stats can run I believe. Windowsupdate and everything works fine, so I'm good to go.
 
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