Clean Install of Vista Home Premium without Reinstallation Disk

[veritasffg]

I have an HP Vista Home Premium machine.  When I bought the machine, of course, I did not receive reinstallation disks - but I burned factory restore DVDs which include the operating system as well as necessary drivers and all the applications which came with the PC.  I would like to do a clean install of Vista (legally), and omit all the other original software.  If I can locate and purchase a full (not an OEM) version of Vista Home Premium (used), without the COA (or product key); slipstream this disk with SP1 & SP2; do a clean install of the slipstreamed disk and use my original Vista product key during the installation, would this process do the trick for me?  I have software which I can use to extract and reinstall all the drivers currently in use on my machine, so that should not be a problem.   .

Any comments or suggestions would be very welcome.

[Rob Pomeroy]

Your original Vista product key is probably an OEM key and almost certainly would not work on a retail version of Vista.  I don't think you can legally purchase a copy of Vista without the COA, so you would just use the COA from the copy you bought.

Bear in mind that slipstreaming has some grey areas legally, too.

[veritasffg]

Rob Pomeroy:

Thanks for your post.  In the past, I have successfully used the above-described process to reinstall the XP operating system, when a reinstall was determined to be necessary - but when the PC owner had lost or misplaced reinstallation disks.  In these instances, I had no problems using a full O/S (non-OEM) disk to reinstall from, but using the original OEM product key for the installation.  Again, the only purpose for this process is get around the fact that I have no O/S reinstallation disk - which gives me no alternative but to do a factory restore operation in lieu of a clean install of Vista.
 
It was probably not clear from my original post - but my plan was not to purchase another license for Vista Home Premium - rather to try to locate and buy a used Vista disk (with or without the COA) to use only for reinstallation purposes and, as stated above, using my original product key for the reinstall.

Thanks again for your post.