Hang when upgrading from XP Home to Pro

[phil]

I bought an HP Pavilion a330n desktop machine a month ago,
and it came pre-installed with Windows XP Home.

It worked fine.

Then I bought the Windows XP Professional Upgrade, and
tried to upgrade my XP Home to XP Pro.

After the first reboot it does, you see the Windows XP
Professional splash screen (used to say "Home"), and then
the screen goes black.

It never comes back, no matter how long I wait.

I can recover back to Windows XP Home, and everything works
fine again.

I've tried to do this upgrade several times, and it always
fails the same way.

There's no other hardware attached to the system, I've
disabled the Norton Anti-Virus that came pre-installed on
the disk, and I've even flashed the BIOS with the latest
firmware from HP.

Nothing changes.

Any suggestions?

 

[BobDelaney]

Check with HP's tech support on this issue, and ask if XP Pro is
supported on that machine. My limited experience with HP machines has been
fraught with upgrade problems.
Also ask yourself why you would want to do this upgrade at all! You
already *have* Windows XP on the machine. XP Pro contains some features to
support running on a large corporate network, and supports high-end web
developers who absolutely need to test ASP scripts in a local IIS
environment, and if you are not familiar with those terms, you don't need
this feature either. If yours is a standalone home computer, there is
absolutely no benefit to be gained from going from XP Home to XP Pro. The
two operating systems are byte-for-byte the same, the exact same code, no
difference. There is no qualitative or quantitative advantage in XP Pro that
does not exist in XP Home. You already have Windows XP. Why re-install
something you already have?

 

[phil]

I want to use Microsoft's Visual C# development tools, and
some functionality (e.g. Web Services) is only available
under XP Pro and not XP Home.

I called HP's technical support. If your system worked out
of the box (with XP Home), they don't want to get involved.

They said to contact Microsoft about upgrading to a
"different" MS operating system.

So I called Microsoft technical support.

They suggested I install XP Pro into a different directory,
or do a format install and lose all the applications that
came bundled with the system from HP.

Neither is a good solution, in my mind.

I searched Microsoft's knowledge base. The only
somewhat-relevant articles I could find were related to
upgrading from Windows 98 or ME, and talked about turning
off anti-virus and removing extra hardware.

I turned off anti-virus, and had no extra hardware.

Didn't help.

This newsgroup is pretty much my last hope for some help
with this.

I just want to overlay XP Pro on XP Home, and keep the
bundled apps.

It shouldn't be this hard, and the upgrade process
shouldn't just go off into the weeds with no error messages.

The system is clearly capable of running XP Home; since as
you say XP Pro is "byte for byte the same", why isn't this
working?