Cutting corners after re-formatting hard drive

[Guest]

I have an six-year-old IBM Aptiva which came with Windows 98 and Office 2000
installed. After I purchased it, I registered the products on-line.

A few months ago, I purchased Windows XP Office upgrade. I had a tech
person upgrade the operating system to XP Professional (and I got the disks)
and install the Office XP upgrade. Fab! It worked well.

We decided to re-format the hard drive a few days ago. Everything was
backed up to external hard drive. Instead of re-installing Windows 98 then
upgrading to XP, we just installed XP. A few glitches (it missed copying 39
files, but the rest seemed to go OK). We have yet to re-register the product
online as we don't have the internet happening again on it yet.

So we tried to do the same with Office. We installed XP Office. Entered
the product key code and got the Error 1608. I've been on line and found and
tried the fixes, to no avail.

Please tell me whether we should now uninstall Office XP, then re-install
Office 2000 then upgrade to Office XP?

Are we out of our depth and should hand it over to the professionals?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Kind regards,
Anne.

 

[DL]

That error is usually as a result of installing an Office upgrade edition,
its looking for, and cannot find the qualifying edition.
When you start the install process, at some point there will be an
indication that it is searching for a qualiying edition, when it cannot find
one you have the option to locate it yourself, at this point insert the
office2k cd, and continue. Once validated take it out, reinsert OfficeXP cd

 

[DL]

Further reading
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315995