ms office instalation (not sure)

[gerryg50]

Have fitted new mother board athlon 1.6 cpu and hard drive to my computer,all works perfectly.Now for my problem ,I have several versions of office that I used in my bussiness ,having retired from this I was not very careful with my instalation cd pakages when I cleared my office up and although I kept the cd's for the office versions the jewle cases with code are not with their cd.The code numbers are written down but some of the cd's are damaged I think.Question one is their a way of transfering the working version of office from my old hard drive which is now D. The computer will boot up from this if made drive C but all the drivers for my new board are not on it and its small and full.
Question 2. can I find out if the cd that is good, is the same version as the office running on the old hard drive and find the code no in the working program or is their a way to find the key code from the cd .I hope this makes sense to someone as its driving me mad.Ps you may wonder why I am getting back to useing my computer after being so carless with it, well I became totally disalusioned with business but now wish to use front page and accsess agian . many thanks gerryg

[kaplinb]

Answer 1. There is no (legal) way to transfer working copy of Office to another installation of operating system - you can only re-install it.
Answer 2. Compare the versions of Office applications .exe files on your hard drive and installation CD. Do do this, right-click, for example, MSACCESS.EXE on your D: drive and choose Properties, then Version tab. Write down the version number. Do the same on your installation CD. If you didn't apply SR patches, version number must be the same. To find appropriate CD key, try them one after another (as you do with keys on your key ring trying to open the door.)
By the way, all versions of Office are backward compatible, that means you can open any Office document created by particular version on the higher version of Office. Check your CDs - version 2000 (file versions beginning with 9.) will be good (I don't believe you dump your Office XP CDs already). Install it from CD and forget about installation on your D: drive.
Happy Holidays!