[ltp] XP Key doesn't work!

[Nick Bower]

Hi - when receiving my laptop, the first thing I did was blow away my
windows xp partition, expecting to use the XP license for VMWare
instead.

The trouble is that I tried installing XP Pro within VMWare and it won't
accept the Windows XP product license key that came with the laptop - I
can only presume this is the volume/retail licensing split, which I
hadn't predicted.

Has anyone been able to obtain a compatible XP CD without all the IBM
junk or at least derive an XP .iso compatible with my key from the IBM
service partition (I can mount it but it's huge)?

nick