re: lost access to all programs after XP Home installed on same partition as XP Pro
Saturday, March 18, 2006 at 12:48 pm
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Richard Harris
(259 messages posted)
You may have caused a problem with the XP registry. Specifically, the registry for
XP-pro had a lot of entries that pointed to programs, program preferrences, etc.
By installing XP-home you probably created a new, fresh registry, that knows nothing
about any of those programs. Whether the old XP-pro registry still exists, I do
not know.
Given where you are, the most reliable thing to do would be to re-install all programs,
while logged-in under the new copy of XP-home.
In theory, you could copy registry entires from XP-pro (if it still exists and if
you can "read" it) to XP-home. But, in practice I doubt that anyone less than a
super-geek could do it correctly. I would not try this.
As for the user data that your friend did not want to lose, before going further
to "fix" this PC, please consider backing up all user data off of the PC. A external
USB 2.0 hard drive might be ideal. Remember that user files like DOC, XLS, JPG can
be copied&pasted. But, programs and the operating system need to be backed-up by
more specialized means, such as Norton GHOST or Acronis True Image.
On Saturday, March 18, 2006 at 11:47 am, Jean wrote:
>I'm trying to set up a legitimate OS on a friend's computer. He originally installed
>a bootleg copy of XP Pro over his OEM installed XP Home. He couldn't activate XP
>Pro and asked me to put the original, legit XP Home back on. XP Pro would not let
>anyone log in until activated. So, I installed XP Home on the same partition in
>a different folder (yeah, I know that wasn't smart but I didn't want to lose all
>his data.) I can get it to boot to Home but can't open any of the programs that
>were under XP Pro. They are still on the drive when I check it. Is there any way
>to get the programs recognized by XP Home? Thanks for any help you can provide.
> I'm hoping I don't have to go back & do a clean install as right now I have no
way
>to back up his data and I don't have info for all of the software that's loaded
in
>his computer.
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