recovering vista home premium from home basic disk

[millervt]

Recently my friend's sony viao crashed hard. Blue screen of death no matter what they tried (normal boot, safe mode, etc). They asked for my help, since i'm reasonably proficient at fixing simpler things and figuring out what is wrong and how best to fix it, and usually can save them time and money from bringing their PC to geek squad, etc.

Of course, they don't have any recovery disks, since sony doesn't give you any, and they didn't make any. Exploring their PC shows a corrupted partition structure - couldn't find any usable harddrive data, etc. So I concluded that, with luck, all they will need is a reformat and reload (as opposed to, say, the harddrive being physically damaged or something).

Anyway, one other problem they had been having is that their optical drive was "flaky", often refusing to read disks. How wonderful! Long story short, I managed to load vista home basic successfully from a restore disk of one of my laptops (a dell), so that is good - the laptop hardware appears ok, and a few minutes of playing with the reloaded vista didn't cause any errors.

Now, my question/problem - what I have loaded is a lesser license than what they are entitled to (the sony came with home premium), and it isn't activated, since I wasn't sure about activating it using a copy of windows that is already loaded and running on one of my PCs. what I want to do is to be able to upgrade to home premium (if possible, although I could live with home basic for now if need be, as long as microsoft doesn't think i'm trying to pirate something) using their license.

So, the options I wonder if I have:
1. Can I activate the current home basic load with the home premium license key? I'm prepared to live with basic if the other options below won't work, they will just be thrilled to have a working laptop again.

2. Can I do their online upgrade to premium using the existing home premium key? It wants me to activate windows first, so this has the same question as #1, whether I can use the premium key to activate this

3. I do have a toshiba home premium restore cd for another of my laptops, but I couldn't get it to run in any automated way, because (unlike the dell restore cd), it wouldn't run when it figured out this wasn't a toshiba laptop. Can I manually access the vista install files somehow (they must be on there...) and load premium on top of basic?

4. Other options?

thanks!

My preference would be #2 first, since that seems the safest way to go

 

[techmanc]

Well as I understand it if you have a lower tiered version of Windows installed on your system you can do the upgrade option but what version and prices are available for a basic upgrade I dont know. If you goto the System properties and click the Learn More Online link if should take you through a valdation process and point you to your upgrade options. The caveat may be that when the system will installs the Windows Genuine Advantage you may get annoying popups and or may try to deactivate your system. Its been awhile since I tested there WGA activation so I dont know if there are any other changes to it.

 

[pcgeek11]

Why don't you install Vista Home Premium using the disk you have loaded Vista Home Basic from?

If it is a preactivated disk it is easy to turn it into a generic OEM disk by making an ISO image of the dvd on your hard disk.

Then remove the $OEM$ Folder entirely and the PID.TXT file from the image in the Sources Folder using an ISO Editor such as Power ISO.

Save the edited ISO file and then burn it to a blank DVD.

Then you will have an OEM Disk you can install any version from.

Use the Key code from the COA Label attached to the notebook to activate the Notebook.

A short 5 minute call to Microsoft may or may not be required. This is legitimate and works like a charm. I have done this numerous times for customers as long as they have a COA Label attached to the PC as required.

pcgeek11