Modifying XP Home - From Upgrade to Full?

[JimmieHa]

I legally own an OEM copy of Windows XP Home Edition.  It came bundled with one of those cheap eMachines systems always on sale at Best Buy and Circuit City.  Unfortunatley, instead of receiving an actual WinXP OEM disc, the system came with three Norton Ghost formatted system restore discs.

Now I need to reinstall Windows on my machine, but I can\'t use the eMachines restore discs without losing all my important data.  So I borrowed a friend\'s copy of XP Home (legal), and I\'m attempting to do a \"Repair Installation\" using that.  The problem is, his copy is a Retail Upgrade disc.

My question is:  How can I edit the contents of a Retail Upgrade disc so I can use my OEM license key (printed on hologram sticker on back of case) with it?  Does editing setupp.ini actually work?  The current setupp.ini looks like this:

[Pid]
ExtraData=70747366656E6D756973AC4DB41510
Pid=55285000

Both the ExtraData and the Pid numbers here are different from the other articles I\'ve read on the subject.  Does that matter?  Any help would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks!

[JiveBologna]

Okay, I just registered - hence the name change.  ^^

I fixed my problem.  The ExtraData value on my Retail disc is different from what I saw posted everywhere else - so when I tried editing setupp.ini, nothing worked - the disc remained a Retail disc with Retail license.  It wasn\'t until I tried changing the ExtraData value that I was able to get it to work.

After doing that, editing setupp.ini does work, but if the values don\'t correspond, you won\'t be able to activate.

For example, I tried editing the pid to 51882OEM - Retail that accepts OEM license keys.  While it did work and install properly, when it came time to activate, the System IDs generated by Windows weren\'t being recognized by Microsoft as valid IDs for activation.  Apparently, part of the System ID sent to Microsoft when you activate corresponds to your installation disc info.  This was solved by burning a new copy, only this time using 82503OEM - a straight-up OEM disc.  After doing another repair install, I was able to activate and get things working.

Just an FYI, for anyone else attempting this.  Good luck!