clean install with upgrade product

Can anyone help me with this problem? I upgraded to Windows Vista Home
Premium last week. It worked fine for a little while, then my hard drive
failed. I called my Dell representative, and he said the problem was that my
Dell computer was using a RAID 1 array, which Vista didn't support yet. The
only way to restore my computer was to turn off the RAID array and do a clean
re-install of Vista.

This worked, and everything has been working fine. The problem is that now
Windows Vista wants to be activated (again) and says that my Product Key is
not valid for a clean install. I was legitimately upgrading from Windows XP
to Windows Vista, and only did the clean re-install after the system totally
failed.

Does Microsoft ever make an exception?