Well, I have reinstalled win 98 SE in the old beast that had crashed and upgraded it to 256 MB RAM. I'm still weighing options on wiping the 40 GB drive and installing it. I had hoped it would plug and play but alas that was not to be, I tried. I have my original recovery discs for both the XP computer that is gone and the 98 computer so I could probably work around the driver issues but I don't have my product code for the XP and can't figure out how to get it out as it is not the main operating system and none of the code finders I've tried will recognize it in its external configuration. I may try plugging it into another computer running XP that I own in hopes that it could be opened up but have strong doubts that that will work either.

Does anyone know if slaving it to another operating system running XP would work as far as digging the product code out? I really want to run XP on all machines if possible without having to repurchase an operating system I've already paid for. It wouldn't be such an issue if M$ hadn't dropped every operating system released prior to XP, but they did and now I'm in a quandry.