m2pmd70

Two acronyms I am uninformed about. Pardon me while I go educate myself about the aforementioned. I just started messing with the whole Vista/WIM thing - have done a bunch of custom XP CDs tho. The machine came with Vista Home Premium preinstalled, and I'm working from the DVD that came with it. I've read that there are various versions of Vista install media. All I know is my DVD allowed me to enter a key and/or choose what version to install after I deleted the PID.txt from /sources. Would the "upgrade" option be grayed simply because I'm using an OEM key?

Here's the deal, I recently got an XPS420 swapped out with my POS computer at work. Nice upgrade for me, but the OS needed a reinstall. Shortly after spending nearly two days (and getting behind in my work) installing all my stuff and getting the network and backup scripts and all working the hard drive came down with a bad case of the badsextors. Being already behind I bought a new drive and cloned the bad one. I've had quite a few crashes and hangs since, presumably I copied corrupted files over from the bad drive. My first clue was my Computer Management MMC has gone AWOL. SFC /scannow, right? Nope, finds corrupt files but apparently doesn't recognize the DVD source. Installing SP1 messed that up I guess (can't uninstall it either). So I slipstream an SP1 disk from my Dell OEM (using only MS's tools no vlite). Still no go. SP2 disk, same story. So now I'm thinking repair install, which in Vistaese is called "Upgrade" and runs from within Windows. No go, SP0, 1 & 2 all have the option grayed out. I tried deleting the PID.TXT file from the disk (didn't find one in the WIM). Still grayed. Which brings us (finally) to my question.... Is there some way to enable or force the upgrade option using a Dell Vista OEM disk (hopefully with SP2 integrated)?