Weird Windows XP CD

Today my XP-Professional CD arrived for my collection. I immediately took out my old Dell Latitude notebook, put the CD in the drive and started the setup. At first glance I noticed that the CD is a little different from the retail version. At the top left was a note that this is a school version. Interestingly, the setup wizard asked me for an installation medium of an older Windows version. Is this an upgrade CD?

Right after that I aborted the setup and took a closer look at the CD. The CD has the label “VX2PCCP_DE“. After a Google search I found out that it is a Windows XP Professional (SP2b) Upgrade CD.

Interestingly, I found a PID number in the setupp.ini that I can’t find anywhere on the Internet. Even the channel ID is not known to me.

Since the PID ends with 000, it should be possible to activate it with a retail key. So I put the CD back into my Dell notebook, started the setup and entered my key. But Windows did not accept the key.

From this point I found out that there are special upgrade keys in addition to retail, VLK and OEM keys. I couldn’t find a suitable upgrade key on the internet either, until I found one in the comments section of a GitHub Gist post.

Windows XP accepted the upgrade key and the installation worked without problems.

For those who are interested in the CD, I have dumped the CD and uploaded it to the Internet Archive.