I bought a used laptop without any recovery CD’s. When the laptop died, I removed the original hard drive, and sent the laptop off for a replacement motherboard and hard drive. It came back with XP Pro installed on the hard drive, but the COA on the bottom of the laptop is for Windows XP Home. The partition on the first hard drive that had the OS (also XP Pro) got damaged, and is unreadable.
From experience, I know I need a bootable CD (no floppy drive on the laptop) to reinstall the OS if and when (when, really) something bad happens. Is there any way I can get a bootable CD for XP Home, and use the proper COA when installing? I would like my OS to be legit AND secure.
Thanks for any help you can offer.
Karen
