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XP Upgrade "Setup cannot find a previous version"


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Stupid short titles... lol.

Windows XP Upgrade CD "Setup cannot find a previous version of Windows installed on your computer" Error message...

so... my friend has a windows XP upgrade CD. we argue for about 30 minutes that you cannot turn a Upgrade CD into an completly unattended CD.. the error that we get when we try to install is:

Setup cannot find a previous version of windows installed on your computer. To continue, Setup needs to verify that you qualify to use this upgrade product.

Please insert your Windows 3.51, Workstation, Windows NT 4.0 Workstation, Windows 2000 Professional, Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows Millennium CD into your CD-ROM drive.

now, i've done some research in this and all i have found is that if you take out the CD at this message, insert a retail CD of an older OS (which he has, windows ME), then hit enter and put back in the Upgrade CD it will install XP without the need of having another OS preinstalled. not sure how winnt.sif and all those files are handled yet thats tomarrows goal lol. so... my main question is... Can an Upgrade Windows XP CD be turned into Unattended? without the CD swap... thats gonna be very annoying for him having to carry around 2 CDs to restore..

thanks

Bi0haZarD

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  • 2 years later...

I'm not sure if this will work but you might be able to copy the "Win9x" directory from the WinMe CD to your XP Unattended media. It may not bypass the message, but it might bypass having to swap the disk. I think all it does is checks for certain files in that directory.

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I'm not sure if this will work but you might be able to copy the "Win9x" directory from the WinMe CD to your XP Unattended media. It may not bypass the message, but it might bypass having to swap the disk. I think all it does is checks for certain files in that directory.
this was my thought as well. (I'm not sure exactly what file the setup looks for...) But if you look at it this way... if you have the 9x folder.. you could install either OS (as long as you modify the boot loader) Edited by twig123
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Windows 95 setup only looked for the presence of one of a number of files. One of those files was command.com. You could simply make a dummy file called command.com in the root of the c drive and win95 would pass the compliance check. Because people did this, windows 98 randomly checks for the presence of about 120 files. If any files from this list are not found the compliancy check is failed. Not only that, windows 98 stored a checksum of the files it looked for so you couldn't make a dummy file. To get around people finding out this list of files setup looks for windows xp simply looks for a previous media. I'm not sure what files it looks for, but it is probably a list of known files along with checksums of the files.

If you want to do an unattended install, you really need a fully compliant media. This would be in setupp.ini

-gosh

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  • 3 weeks later...

i'm really hoping someone is still reading this topic, as my pc has had the same problem for weeks and i'm really stuck.

I don't have the original XP home disk that was installed and when I try to load on the new updated version I get the same error.

I have tried re-formatted teh disk since(the partition remains as I haven't figured how to remove it). and it still wont load as a new setup.

Can anyone help me please I am really stuck, its been to bits twice as i've swapped bits round etc.

Thanks,

Ben

Edited by ben_m_g
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You don't have any older version installed and you don't have any previous version's disk, you are not entitled to use an upgrade version, that should be clear to anybody.

Get a Win95 cd on ebay.

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I appreciate the advice not the unnecessary sarcasm, it wasn’t that clear or I wouldn’t have asked.

If you read the post I tried updating before I formatted the drive and that’s when I had the “feature” come up, I would have been entitled, but it had been messed about with so much I decided (under advise) to start again from scratch.

Perhaps I should of made it clearer but I wasn’t sure that buying an older OS would work or not, as doing so with XP didn’t.

I am not that computer savvy, I only know what I have found out by either fixing what I have broken, or on these type of websites, so I can only apologise if I don’t know something that seems really obvious to someone with years of experience.

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