Installation difficulties

[A Burness]

Due to a hard drive failure I'm having to install XP prior to updating to
Vista.

The install gets to the point where it copies the files to the hard drive
and then restarts. After that point however it fails to continue and gives a
disk not readable error. The hard drive is brand new and I am capable of
installing Vista on it fine (due to Vista being an upgrade version the
product key is only accepted if I go via an XP installation).

Has anyone got any suggestions for resolving this?

 

[peter]

If you install Vista without entering the License Key you will have
installed a Trial version.
Upgrade this version by installing Vista again and this time enter the
License Key
peter

 

[DL]

You dont need to install the qualifying product to upgrade, you simply need
the cd to insert when the installation complains

 

[peter]

sorry but Vista needs XP installed and activated before it will
upgrade.
XP just needed a copy of a previous qualifying OS on CD to verify but not
Vista
peter