Installing XP Pro over Home edition

Need some advise.

Went to my sisters to install an anti-virus program on her computer. She just bought an new HP a few weeks ago and the Norton virus that was on there was a trial and it ran out. I was going to install Sophos on it.

I thought it would be better to uninstall the Norton before installing the Sophos so I went to Add/Remove and removed Norton........then hit the restart after it was finished. Well, it wouldn't boot back up at all. Says the RPC is missing and do the setup again. Of course the new computer doesn't come with a Windows disk???

Will Windows XP Pro install over the home edition without deleting the files on there?

She has files that are very important to her on the hard drive.

Or will I have to just take out her hard drive and install it in my computer as a slave so I can burn a cd with the files she doesn't want to lose?

 

Sportsnut, if they are absolutely critical files, I'd slave her drive to yours and burn the file before doing anything else, just to be safe. Foolproof.

Not sure if an XP Prop ugrade CD will overwrite the XP Home, or just make a second install on the C drive with dual boot options. They're almost the same operating system. Somebody else may have better info on that.

 

AFAIK, you can upgrade an XP Home install to XP pro. Just pop the disc in and run the setup program in windows.

 

HA! That may have been a slip of the KB, but I got a laugh outta that!

Agreed with the above posters. Always backup before upgrading. The official info from MS is that you can upgrade from Home to Pro using either Full or Upgrade Pro CD: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;292607

But:

You may wanna check that 1st...

 

I installed her drive as a slave on my computer...backed up the files.....then did a clean format/install with the XP Pro.


But now I have another problem I can't figure out.

After the clean install, I installed the Sophos anti-virus and it went on just fine, but then I installed Outpost and on the reboot it took me to the screen saying there was problem with a program I added or deleted and it gave me the chooses to boot in safe/ normal, etc. I would choose "normal" and it took me back to the same screen. The second time I picked "normal" again and it booted. I uninstalled Outpost and it booted up with no problems.

SO I thought Outpost was the problem, so I tried Tiny Personal firewall and the same thing.....it took two or three times before it would go into windows. So I uninstalled Tiny and everything was fine.

SO then I tried Zone Alarm.............Same problem.........

Any ideas why this happening? It is an HP pavilion a350n. The Windows firewall is disabled. And I tried it with Sophos uninstalled and the same thing, it won't let me install a firewall.

Could there be something in the boot settings causing this?

 

Oh man...its not pretty when you upgrade Pro RTM over Home SP1.





A lof things break.

2 Just off the top of my head:

Remote Access Connection Manager service (needed by the dial up and PPPoE people) and System Restore are fooked.

 

I did a clean install with a format on the hard drive and the Windows I installed was a corporate Windows XP Pro with SP1 on the CD.


There is nothing else installed except windows.....no anti-virus, no other programs, nothing. I went into the setup and didn't see anything. I can't figure it out.

I have tried several more times with 3 different firewalls and it doesn't like them for some reason.

PS. I have the same install on my computer with no problems. Could the bios or the hardware have something to do with it?

 

Maybe your not configuring them properly. Just mess with the settings. Ive ran into similar problems before, just played with the settings and I finally got it.