A miracle happened today at about 12:50p PST. I looked around the web to find a customer service number for Microsoft. I got several. The first was to the usual ex-British Empire accented guy from a tropical cyclone country. He might have had a PhD in OS design but he was on script like a clickable menu.
The next number was paydirt.
Backstory. I spent most of the last few days fiddling around on computer stuff cleaning out old hardware and software when I realized I committed the most unforgivable of all computer crimes. I lost the original FRP Microsoft XP pro/w SP3 disk! I felt the Orson Wells chill in the sewers of Vienna.
My heady days with FreeBSD ended five and half years ago when I couldn't get X11 running on Stable-6.2 and took the XP descent ...
So today on the second free call to Microsoft, I got a tech and bought a replacement disk for about 30.00USD. I am still spinning.
There was a verification process that included the original retail box product number (found on the booklets) and the installed registration number on the System Properties page.
CG