Home -> Professional upgrade problem, setup loops on restart

[Mike Williams]

I had a perfectly fine XP Home installation on a new Compaq desktop. I
am attempting to upgrade to XP Professional, using a disc and codes given
me by the techs at my office. It seemed to go OK, but setup didn't
complete and now it's in a loop. The bios loads, and windows starts to
load. I get three scans of the progress bar, the screen goes black and a
dos-type message flashes so quickly I can't read it, and it reboots, and
etc etc.

I tried forcing the system to boot from the CD drive, and it re-ran the
setup program, and then tried to reboot and re-run the setup program
again. I let the setup program run this way completely and on the reboot
set it to boot from the hard drive, and got back into the same loop
described above. I tried booting into Safe mode, and got a message
saying "setup can't run in Safe mode."

I thought about going back to Home, but discovered that this bloody new
system didn't come with the OS disc.

Any suggestions or insight would be GREATLY appreciated.

THANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOU

[If this is the wrong group, my apologies;
microsoft.public.windowsxp.general stopped appearing on my server list,
for some reason.]

 

[Guest]

Probably because your techs gave you a corporate copy of XP. Can not upgrade
with that, you need to either wipe the drive and do a clean install, or if
possible and if space provides, do a parallel install on a different
partition. This will enable you to recover some files from your previous
install, but not programs.

 

[Guest]

Hello, Eric,
Have you ever managed to bypass this error?