hi, a user brought in her older custom-built pc & asked me to reinstall her OS is it was full of viruses, etc. She did not have her installation cd, and no product key or COA sticker either (perhaps the XP Home OEM that’s on there now was an upgrade of an earlier version - I think could have been built before COA stickers were required on side of box). But, in system properties I did find an OEM product key, it is 20 digits long.
So I began to reinstall XP Home OEM with one of my cd’s and when it got to the screen where it wanted the product key, it wanted a 25 digit product key. At this point I don’t know what to do.
The shop where the customer had the pc build is out of business and they did not give her any of the cd’s that came with her custom-built pc. What to do?
More thinking on the subject, I am wondering why there was no sticker on the case. Possibly the shop that built it was not above-board. That being the possible scenario, I am thinking about interrupting the setup process, fdisking, and installing a retail xp version. I would attempt to do this by removing the hard drive and hooking it up to my other pc through an adapter cable, then deleting the os off it. Don’t know if this will work or not. Basically I’m stuck and need some ideas on how to move forward. Thanks very much for your time!
Product key provided in system properties syntax is as follows:
(5 #’s – OEM- 7 #’s – 5 #’s) total 20 digits
And the product key syntax it’s requesting is:
5#’s-5#’s-5#’s-5#’s-5#’s (total 25 digits)
System Specs:
XP Home 2002 OEM ver 5.1.2600, SP3, build 2600
MOBO or Chipset Mfgr: Micro-Star Int’l. Co., Ltd, MS-7061
Model KM 266-8237 X86-based pc
CPU: x86 Family 6 Model 8 Stepping 1 Authentic AMD 1400 MHz (AMD Duron)
BIOS ver & date: Phoenix Award Technologies, Ltd., ver. 6.00 PG, 7/28/2004
SM BIOS ver: 2.3
RAM: total 1,536 MB: slot 0 = 1 GB, slot 1 = 512 MB
Available physical memory: 1.05 GB
Total virtual memory: 2.00 GB
Available virtual mem: 1.96 GB
Pg file space 3.32 GB
HD: Western Digital 500 GB
