[rdanner3]

Originally Posted by vistajames

yes you can use it

Very cool. Machine has MCE 2005 on presently, which i knew was based on WinXP Pro, but wasn't sure that I could do an in-place upgrade/repair install from a WinXP Pro CD without hosing the works. Reassuring that I can.

Still not keen on even trying Windows 7, though that's more because I've never been keen on any of the Vista flavors. Ironically, it's precisely because Vista has such poor performance on games (amongst other minuses) that I made the determination about my less-than-stellar opinion of Vista. Wireless performance sucks bricks, too, which only adds to the load.

I do have a copy of Win7, but haven't tried to install yet. Setting the computer involved to dual-boot Vista (Home Premium) and Win7 ought to be a real trip, and I prefer to go on trips a bit differently, just not on drugs or anything else stupid!

(Microsoft's whine of "We don't care whether you go Vista or WIn7. Just dump XP already!" just amuses me no end. They can't stand the fact that Vista was such a loser OS, just like WinME.)

[DVOM]

XP doesn't like it when you adjust partitions or move the OS from one partition to another. What you can try is using a live CD to edit your windows registry. Go to "HK Local Machine>System>MountedDevices" and delete everything on the right side that will delete. XP will rebuild these keys when it first boots.

It looks like the attached picture. You can use a BartPE CD or maybe something like this:

http://www.pcregedit.com/index.html

And here's the picture of my registry entries that I delete before editing the partitions. Yours will probably have fewer partitions so your blue highlighted entries won't be as many:

[TheOutcaste]

Originally Posted by rdanner3

Considering adding the System Recovery partition to the boot list, so that if someone fouls the MBR's custom coding, it would still be accessible. As far as I understand, it lives at "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(0)\minint"

Hadn't thought to try that. Not sure it would work on my Dell, as it doesn't use the WinPE environment like yours does. It also uses special type bytes in the partition table, which get changed when you choose the option to boot to the Recovery partition, or the Utilities partition; not sure it would boot to the Recovery partition if the type bytes don't get changed to what it expects. Another experiment to ad to my to do list.

Originally Posted by rdanner3

If I needed to do a in-place update, could I use a WinXP SP2 CD to do so?

I haven't tried this on my MCE box yet. Haven't bothered to slipstream the SATA driver I need.
Haven't been able to find anything one way or the other on the web as to if this would work or not.
My first thought is you'd end up with XP Pro instead of MCE, but the Pro disk shouldn't overwrite the Media Center components, so maybe it won't affect it. And this

Originally Posted by vistajames

yes you can use it

indicates it does work, which is good to know.

One question though vistajames, did you use an XP Pro OEM disk or Retail disk? Most of what I found says the MCE key won't work with a retail disk, so you'd have to use the XP Pro key. Which would constitute an installation (meaning it can't be installed on another PC), and would likely have to be activated.

Still be a good idea to have an image of the drive, just in case.

This search of sourceforge.net has a few free imaging apps, G4U, Clonezilla, and FOG to name three:
Free drive imaging software

HTH

Jerry

[vistajames]

Originally Posted by TheOutcaste

One question though vistajames, did you use an XP Pro OEM disk or Retail disk? Most of what I found says the MCE key won't work with a retail disk, so you'd have to use the XP Pro key. Which would constitute an installation (meaning it can't be installed on another PC), and would likely have to be activated.

i belive my disk was retail, not oem

[rdanner3]

My copy of XP Pro is also retail.