Should anyone be in the same boat ...

Because of the high cost of full Vista versions, I purchased an upgrade. The thing is that with brand computers or some brand computers, it looks like that Xp home is installed on a FAT32 partition and Vista home premium wont install on that.

I have an ACER and I couldn't see how to set things right so I wouldn't have wasted the upgrade fee. The problem was that I had to convert the FAT32 disk while XP was still on it. I didn't know you could do it in XP till I discovered that the following command will set things right ... [from the command line of course]

convert c:/ fs: ntfs

This then asks for a volume label ... mine was ACER ... it then converted the disk to NTFS without any hassles. Then Vista installed without any hassles after that was done. This however was after quite a few hours of attempting to get Vista to install in any way I could including that workaround of not putting your product number in when it boots up. I found the method of doing a clean install doesn't work very well [at least for me].

Just thought that if anyone else purchased a brand computer with a FAT32 Xp install via the recovery disks, this info might save some newbie a lot of grief.