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I bought a nice Dell used for my brother-in-law for christmas and I want to wipe the drive clean and put a fresh install of XP on it. Of course they couldn't find the system restore discs, but the CD-key is on the side of the machine fortunately.
Having never dealt with this, I want to accomplish two things:
1. Do a clean XP Pro install using the CD key on the case
2. Preserve the diagnostics partition at the front of the drive, this could come in handy if he experiences any problems, I live almost 400 miles away.
If I use my XP pro cd to install will using the key on the side of the case work? And I'm also assuming that I can just install to the existing XP partition and the diag partition will stay intact?
Having never dealt with this, I want to accomplish two things:
1. Do a clean XP Pro install using the CD key on the case
2. Preserve the diagnostics partition at the front of the drive, this could come in handy if he experiences any problems, I live almost 400 miles away.
If I use my XP pro cd to install will using the key on the side of the case work? And I'm also assuming that I can just install to the existing XP partition and the diag partition will stay intact?