I installed XP Home Edition several months ago, but left home for awhile and now I must activate it. Instead of activating it now, I want to just install XP Professional, and then activate that. I have the Professional CD, but when I try to boot from the CD, it runs for a min or so, and then my CD stops spinning, as if it recognizes that XP Home is on there and won't let me put Pro on. The reason I can't just log on and install it is because it was past the 30 days so I cannot logon at all. I know my CD drive works cause it is new. Is there any way to just delete my harddrive, since I didn't have anything on it, and install Pro??

Boot your PC with a WIN98 or WINME CD or Boot disk and delete all partition with fdisk and format your HD and make a clean install. MADBOOT.COM Good Look

Windows XP pro would not stop its setup process because of XP Home being on the computer. You should be able to put it in the cd rom and boot from it when your computer starts. You do not want to use a 9x or me disk to format your drive and then install xp because you already know that the xp disk is not booting. Are you trying to run the disk after you boot xp home? also, are your bios settings set up to boot from your cd rom first?? When the cd stops spinning, does your computer then boot xp home as if it wasnt in there? Perhaps your version of xp pro is an upgrade version and not a bootable cd. Your best bet is to reformat and reinstall using the XP Home cd, this might give you another 30 days before having to activate home. Once you have that grace period, then try to run xp pro if you cant figure out how to boot from the pro cd. I just want to clarify again that having xp home installed will not stop your xp pro cd from running setup, it has to be something else.