Upgrading XP Pro to Media Center Edition

[justacruzr2]

Does anyone know if there's an upgrade version of MCE 2005 out there?  I have a version of MCE 2005 that I tried to use to upgrade my XP Pro but it didn't offer the option to upgrade.  I was doing this the normal way by putting in the install disk and then rebooting the computer which takes you into the blue screen setup.  I also tried it by putting the disk in after I had already booted into XP and then clicking on Setup in the root folder of the MCE 2005 disk and selecting install Windows XP from the Welcome to Setup screen.  The first message I got was "The option to upgrade will not be available at this time because Setup was unable to load the file F:\WINNTUPG\NETUPGRD.DLL" (F: is the name of the CD drive the disk was in).  I looked at the folders on the disk and yep, there wasn't any folder named \WINNTUPG.  When I was doing it the normal way and got to the agree to the EULA screen, I scrolled down to the bottom where I got a valuable piece of information.  Don't know if this is the version number of the disk or the EULA but here it is:  MCE_05_RTM_OEM_EN.  I'm assuming that the "OEM" part means it's the OEM version and I suppose that the upgrade option wasn't offered on that version since the OEM wouldn't be upgrading, they would be doing fresh installs.  So is there a retail version available for downloading out there?  I want to upgrade my XP Pro SP3 version to MCE without losing any of my apps or their registry entries.  And will I need to temporarily remove SP3 in order to upgrade?

[justacruzr2]

Sorry.  Everything I see on the web says there never was a retail version of MCE.  Is there a way to trick the install disk into thinking MCE is already installed and then do a repair from the setup disk via the repair option?

[justacruzr2]

OK.  Got it to work.  But it also installed IE7 and WMP11.  Wasn't sure if it would do that during a repair install.  So I've downloaded nLite and .net framework 2.0 (only had 1 and 1.1 installed and nLite requires 2.0) so I can eliminate the installation of IE7 and WMP11.  When I've created that custom XP Media Center Edition 2005 installation disk I will do this again.  It really wasn't that hard and MS winPE was what really helped by allowing me to change the HKLM\System|WPA reg key by importing the WPA reg key from the clean install I did on a spare HDD.  Of course there were some other modifications done as well to HKLM\Local Machine\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion and HKLM\Local Machine\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion and copying the medctroc.inf over.  Thanks to License Crawler for that.

Edited 1 hour ago by justacruzr2