Ok. Here's my situation. I got this laptop a while got with xp, got the free vista upgrade, set up my laptop to dual boot the xp and vista. Recently I decided to switch back to XP and completely remove Vista, so I did. But I was having problems with it. I figured I'd give Vista another shot after formating the drive and starting new. So, I did that. Here's the thing though. I know clean installs are better than upgrades, so that's what I did, using this method: http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/winvista_upgrade_clean.asp which is installing the upgrade without the cd key to put it in as a 30 day trail, then upgrading from that. The only thing is, It seems I can't find my the cd key that came with the upgrade. But, before removing Vista, I backed up the whole partition that it was on. I've looked around online and found that apparently neither Dell nor Microsoft will help much since it's an OEM product. But, I'm wondering if there is any way that I can somehow get the CD key out of all my backed up files. If anyone could help that would be amazing. Thanks.