upgrade from ME to XP Pro

[slc]

My hard drive crashed and burned, and I decided to take
this opportunity with a new hard drive to upgrade from ME
to XP Pro. My question: do I need to reload ME first,
then use the XP upgrade disk, or can I just start with my
upgrade disk from scratch?

 

[Tom Foolery]

As long as your ME is a retail version (not an OEM that was loaded on your
system by the dealer) you can upgrade to XP. Set your BIOS to boot from the
CD ROM. Insert your XP disk and follow the prompts. At one point, you will
be asked to insert the ME disk just to verify that you have a qualifying OS
that can be upgraded. Nothing loads from the ME disk.

 

[=?iso-8859-1?B?UmVu6Q==?=]

My question: do I need to reload ME first,
then use the XP upgrade disk, or can I just start with my
upgrade disk from scratch?

Boot from the XP CD, follow the on-screen instructions, and put your
ME CD into the drive when the XP setup program asks for it. This is
only to verify that you're entitled to use the cheaper upgrade version
of XP, as opposed to the more expensive full version of XP. Nothing
will be installed from the ME CD, and for all of those that are
considering upgrading from ME to XP: please please please start with
an empty harddrive. Upgrading from ME to XP, as opposed to a fresh
install is the worst possible approach as far as future system
stability goes.