Can you repair XP Home mbr with XP Pro disk?

From: Mike (anonymous_at_discussions.microsoft.com)
Date: 07/05/04 

Date: Mon, 5 Jul 2004 11:39:11 -0700

I'm trying to repair a friends computer that's having
problems booting up into XP Home. She doesn't have the
disk XP Home came preinstalled. I tried to use system
restore but she had "Roxio Go Back 3.0" installed which
had system restore turned off. I tried to use Go Back to
go back to a previous time but none of the "go back"
points worked either. after doing a little research on Go
Back I decided to uninstall the program anyway. I have
been able to access the operating system a few times but
only after waiting a very long time.

Also her hard disk had no free space on it but I was able
to remove a few programs and free up some space. I was
also able to run Spybot and removed 72 different types of
spyware and adware. I was able to run defrag in safe
mode, which also seemed to help a little.
I suspect at least one or more viruses but I can't run a
virus scan because her trial period has expired. I would
load Norton Antivirus 2003 professional edition for her
but I don't think there's enough room on the hard drive
and I probably can't access the operating system to do it
anyway.

An error message kept coming up saying that virtual
memory was low so I went into safe mode and changed the
paging file to 576 (384 x 1.5), minimum and 1728 (576 x
3),max. she has 384 MB of RAM.

After all this I'm still not having much luck getting to
the desktop.

I would use the recovery console but it's not installed
and I don't have the disk to install it, I'm also aware
of ASR (Advanced system Recovery) but of course she
doesn't have The XP backup utility installed either and I
don't know if there's another way to install it without
the disk.

Which brings me to my original question, does anyone know
if I can use my XP Pro disk, to put into her machine with
XP Home to repair the MBR?

Any help at all would be greatly appreciated.

Relevant Pages

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