Deleting Vista and installing XP home

Kav · 2nd June 2008

Alright... so I purchased a new Toshiba Satellite P305D-S8814 laptop. It had Vista Home Premium installed from the factory. I need Windows XP and have a legal copy of XP Home that I wish to replace Vista with. However, Toshiba says I'll negate my warranty if I do and they say they have no advice on how to do it.

I fear that I'll jack this up if I try on my own. Does anyone know of a website that provides this type of info? Or, how can I find someone who can do this for me. Of course, I'll pay for it.

Regards.... Kav (Chandler, AZ)

**Steve R Jones** · 2nd June 2008

You need to verify that you can get XP drivers from Toshiba. Some newer machines basically can't run XP.

McTavish · 3rd June 2008

The Toshiba recovery system installed on the hard drive is a strange beast and uses a secondary partition table. You will have to wipe the whole thing before attempting to install XP. My advice would be to replace the hard drive so that if you do have problems with lack of XP drivers then you can just put the old hard drive back in and you will still have a working machine. Hard drives are cheap and easily swapped.

Edit: Sorry, mixing my laptop makes up again, I don't know about the Toshiba recovery system. I still say buying a second hard drive is the way to go.

Ski52 · 3rd June 2008

Mr. Steve is 100% on that! I have a 6 month old Toshiba A215-S4997 or something like that I bought new. It came with XP Home Premium. I don't care for it, and have another legit copy of XP - BUT - there are very few drivers for that particular laptop for XP - only Vista. I could probably make everything work but sooner or later XP will be out Vista will be old and Windows 7 will be the 'new thing' . Might as well learn Vista....

Don't really know about negating the warranty tho...