Help recovering Vista from alternate media

[wshansen]

Conjuring the ghost of Vista past
My laptop had a fatal hardware error and died. A friend gave me an old HP 6910p laptop. It was originally a windows Vista business edition laptop. But it got a virus and they hard wiped the entire HD and installed Linux. So I don't have the original windows media, I just have the Microsoft registration key from the bottom of the laptop. What I DO have is a CD/DVD of windows vista 32bit ultimate UPGRADE edition media. Would I be able to use an OEM edition registration key with.a non-oem disk to recover the OS. (I believe I would need to copy a couple files from XP on to the blank hard drive to install from the upgrade edition, but assuming that works, would the registration key work? My other choices would be to try a windows vista home recovery partition from a salvaged laptop HD I have. (The HP has dual HD bays!) Or try installing an unused copy of windows 8, but the custom HP drivers are all written for either XP or Vista. (I wan't to use it to run older windows 32 bit software, so leaving it Linux is not practical, unless I could make it dual boot.

 

[dualcoremax]

You cannot use OEM key for a non-OEM CD/DVD. Try to install windows xp 32bit version and then upgrade to vista 32 bit.(use your upgrade media.

 

[hang-the-9]

You also can't use an OEM key from one computer on another computer, aside from the fact that the license types must match.