i am trying to help my friend out with her laptop. she has a small hard drive that has windows installed on a 2 gig partition with the rest of the disk (about 15 gigs) on a second partition. why would someone do this, i don't know, but they did. the problem is, the windows partition is now full. i've deleted all the temp files that i could and removed all unneccessary third party software, and moved anything she wants to keep to the second partition(drive d:). this only freed up about 250 mb on this drive, and a month later she's back in the same boat with not enough space to have system restore turned on, and low disk errors all the time just from temp files and cookies and stuff. so, i've told her about saving everything to drive d: and set all her software to save to d:, but that is just a band aid type solution. the real solution would be start from scratch and reformat the drive(or get a larger one and format it) and install windows. the problem is that her winxp cd is missing, she paid for it and has her product key, just no cd. i was wondering if i could dig out my old winxp cd and use it with her product key, or if each disk was specific to each key. i understand that microsoft has to prevent people from using one copy of windows on multiple machines, but i'm talking about the same machine and the same key. could this work? have i overlooked something? please help.

The product key is not specific to a specific Windows CD, but the CD must have the same version of Windows on it. Even a good CD-R copy of such a CD will do fine.
E.g. if her CD was retail XP Home with SP2 updates included, another retail XP Home with SP2 updates included CD, or a copy of one, will do fine.
(If you make a copy of a bootable CD, use "Disk at Once" or similar - copying the CD contents will result in a non-bootable CD.)

Are you sure she got a Windows CD and not a Recovery CD? Notebooks don't normally come with a Windows CD unless you order it at the same time you order the notebook before you buy it.

However, it is difficult to tell in Windows whether the original CD had SP2 updates or not if you don't have it to look at and if you have no bill that said whether it did or not. If the CD was bought after about 2004, it definately had SP2 updates included.
System Information shows you whether XP is SP1, SP2, or SP3, but if you load updates from the web after you install Windows, that is the version of the software installed, not necessarily the version that the CD came with.

......

You have another alternative. You can use third party software, such as Partition Magic, or a freeware partition manipulation program, to make the too small partition larger, and the too big partition smaller.
You are advised to back up essential data before you do that, but usually that goes flawlessly.

Install all programs on the D partition.

Move the swap file (virtual memory) to the D partition.

Save large personal files to a folder on the D partition.

Set the System Restore settings percentage to a lower percentage of the drive.

All those item combined will allow the 2GB C partition to work just fine.

installing boot files only, to a single small partition and then program files to the larger partition is a security issue to protect the original boot files from viruses and attack by malware. The problem is that they created a partition that was a tad too small....as programs must also use portions of the boot files to open and run properly.

In my opinion this should never had been done on such a small hard drive as it left little room to install other programs and download updates and hot fixes.

Using a borrowed, original windows installation (or a legal copy) disc to re-install windows is not illegal. The COA (license) on the bottom of the laptop is unique only to the version of the operating system installed on that computer...the CD used to re-install the operating system will have to match the version...ie.
1)Windows XP Home must use a windows XP home installation disc.
2) Xp Professional must use an XP Pro installation disc.
3) an Upgraded system must use the upgrad version installation disc.....get the picture?

My suggestion here:

Install a larger hard drive.

If that is not possible then:
Have your friend copy all her data she wants to save to CD's. Then during re-installation remove all the partitions and re-create only a single partition to install windows to.

*********************************
do not use a restore cd to reinstall the operating system...use only an original Microsoft installation or copy. Using a recovery/restore CD to reinstall will install the wrong drivers and could possibly damage the computer's components.

Operating Costs = the cost of operating a business
Profits = revenues over and above the operating costs.
Taxes = operating costs mandated by gov.
TaxPayer = what you are called by the gov.

thanks for the help. i just remembered that my copy of winxp was pro and hers is home. i'm not sure whether she had a full cd or a restore disc, but it doesn't really matter now. i'll try the partition manipulator. and if that doesn't work she'll have to bite the bullet and just get a new copy of windows when she buys the new hard drive she will eventually have to buy. thanks for the quick response though.

Snapped Again ! LOL.

Tubesandwires,
whether it is XP or XP SP1 or XP SP2 makes no difference to the COA. The differences started when Microsoft came out with
XP SP2c. That is the version that required it's own special COA.

Operating Costs = the cost of operating a business
Profits = revenues over and above the operating costs.
Taxes = operating costs mandated by gov.
TaxPayer = what you are called by the gov.

problem solved(for now). the freeware parttion manager idea worked great. thanks.