Upgrade
I’ve seen a bunch of links to instructions on how to install the Vista “Upgrade” edition on a PC without an existing Windows partition, something that theoretically shouldn’t be allowed.
I can’t help but feel that this is nothing new—It reminded me of something a friend at Uni was told by Microsoft support 10 years ago.
After a catastrophic PC failure, he was reinstalling software. He had the Office 95 upgrade disc, which required you to insert the installation disk from an earlier version of one of the Office tools to “prove” that you were upgrading. Unfortunately, he’d left all the old disks at his parents’ house.
So, after calling round friends in something of a panic (there was no doubt a paper due) to see if anyone had an old office disk (no-one did), he called up Microsoft support to ask what he could do.
“Oh, when you’re asked to point to an old installation disk,” he was told, “just point it to the Office 95 disk you’re currently installing from. That will work.”
And it did.