i turned on my pc about 5 minutes ago and recieved a lovely message at my login screen. it told me that my copy of windows is not genuine and i need to do something about it. it is an oem copy from one of the largest computer retailers in england,(time) or it was till it went bust. this is no pirate copy, i even have a reload cd from when it went crazy on me. i think the problem is that one time, while installing linux, the partition table corrupted and i had to write 0's to my hard drive. after this my reload cd would not work, but i had a norton ghost backup which i was able to use to restore my windows. even today, my reload cd will not work. it gives me the message 'invalid header' or something. i can only assume that there was a small file that was stored on a seperate hidden partition which the cd looked for and as i used ghost to restore my xp, windows now thinks that it is a copy. i suppose technically it is, but it's a copy of my own windows as the original oem installation died.

what can i do about this? i dont want to pay microsoft £50 for a phone call for them to tell me to buy a new copy of windows. i havent done anything wrong.

please help