Dick Mason wrote on Saturday, July 31, 2004 1:52 PM:

> I bought a used hard drive on ebay and when it arrived, it had XP Pro
> already installed.  I decided to give it a try, but it was slow and
> didn't work well with Outlook or Outlook express, so I ordered a CD
> with SP1 for updating.  When I tried to load SP1, it said I had an
> illegal copy of
> XP.  This really didn't surprise me, and since I didn't expect the
> drive to have XP, I am not out anything.  I bought a legal copy of XP
> Pro, and my question to the list is, can I do a reinstall over the
> top of my existing copy or do I need to reformat?  I don't really
> want to reformat unless it is necessary.  I haven't been able to
> figure out how to save all my existing email messages, some of which
> are work related and fairly important and I would have a fair number
> of applications to reinstall.  Any advice will be appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> Dick Mason
>

The best thing to do is re-format. Get rid of the pirated copy and start
clean.

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