Istall Vista Basic using Premium Disc

[manxman75]

Hello,

My sister's laptop was running Vista basic and started to encounter problems. I have reformatted the hard drive and I am now trying to reinstall Windows.

She does not have a Vista disc however. My Dad has a disc, but he has the Premium version. It is a recovery disc for his laptop. I want to install basic on to my sister's laptop, but every time I install using my Dad's disc, it automatically installs Premium. I'm guessing this is because the disc is automatically entering his product key and thus determining which version of Vista is installed...

Is there a way I can stop this from happening. I want to be able to manually enter my sister's product key so that Vista Basic is installed.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me!

 

[Jonmor68]

You can't use the recovery disk for anything other then what it was designed for. OEM recovery disks are locked in to the hardware on which they were installed.
Why doesn't she have the disk or at least a recovery partition to reinstall from? If it's a brand name pc, she should be able to buy a set of recovery disks for around $40 from the maker if she has lost the recovery partition.

 

[JDFan]

Did you reformat just the OS partition or the entire HDD ?? -- most laptops will have a second hidden partition on them which contains the recovery files and since they are on a seperate partition even after a reformat of the OS partition it might still be there ! There should be a function key to press during boot (varies depending on the maker) to access the files for recovering the system. (More info on using the recovery partition HERE )

 

[Kewlx25]

Even if you install your dad's copy and it has his key, you can always change the key. at least i think it'll let you downgrade the key.. donno, never tried going backwards, but i know i could enter in a new key and upgrade.. 😛