Have I screwed up?

[reWired]

Hello all, I think I just screwed up. I have a dual boot setup XP/Vista that I set up from an Vista Home premium upgrade disc. I wasn't on the pc for a few days and much to my suprise I missed the activation (or rearm to get 120 trial days) time.

I am now locked out and I can't activate using my dvd key because I did a clean install. Any ideas on how I can get by this? I really don't want to reinstall or upgrade my existing xp partition if I don't have to. Thanks in advance

 

[cmdrdredd]

Getting around it would not be legal exactly.

 

[reWired]

I want to be legal, I just wasn't quite ready to commit 100% to Vista for now. It just pisses me off my key is no good for a clean install.

 

[mosco]

So can this be done? I have a different situation.

I have a legal copy of Vista Business (10 dollars for the DVD through my schools MS site license). I have a macbook with bootcamp. I installed vista and all my stuff. Then I found out the parallels doesn't work with vista not through bootcamp. Now parallels 3 is coming out.

So here is the issue, in order for parallels and bootcamp to work together, you have to activate vista in parallels. But I can't install the parallels tools without getting into windows. So without install vista again, is there any way to activate windows?

 

[pcgeek11]

Yes you can activate it. Worst case you may need to call Microsoft.

pcgeek11

 

[jkresh]

reWired, I am not positive (and it may depend on how you installed it) but I think you can activate it without invalidating your xp key (technically your xp license will have transfered but I don't think microsoft will have anyway to tell so you can still boot into and update xp). You could also try removing ethernet (or however you connect to the web) and setting the clock back a few days in the bios, though I have no idea if that will reset the clock in vista.