Windows Vista How to uninstall Vista...

Hi all,

I just installed Vista Beta 2 last night and it wouldn't install on a separate partition like I wanted it to, so I rolled the dice and installed it as a separate OS on my C drive. I can no longer access my WinXP installation. How do I either fix this or uninstall Vista and get my XP install back. Also, I have no virus protection and when I clicked on "Help me choose one ", it only displayed one, but that didn't work either.

Thanks for all your help!!!!!!!!!

 

Do you mean you did a parallel install of Vista to the same partition as your XP install was on? I’ve not tried this but if Vista Beta-2 is capable of doing a parallel install then it should have set up the dual boot menu for you. Do you get a boot menu at startup but XP just won’t boot? If there is no boot menu then this would suggest that Vista has either overwritten your XP install or just not set up dual boot. Do you still see your XP folders on the partition? Has Vista given itself the drive letter of D: or has it come out as C:?

You could try replacing the XP partition boot record to the partition and see if this brings XP back. Boot to the XP CD Recovery Console and run the fixboot command.

 

Tried doing some parallel installs and in all cases it failed. Vista moves the previous OS’s files into a folder called Windows.old, from where it is impossible to boot the OS from, even though Vista will set up its dual boot menu and offer the previous OS as a boot option.

The cure is to copy all the files and folders from the Windows.old folder to replace all the new Vista files with the same names in the root of the partition. Then run fixboot from the Recovery Console to reinstate the XP Partition Boot Record. Once back into XP you can then delete any remaining Vista files.

An alternative to replacing the PBR (if you don’t have a full XP CD) is to save the winload.exe file in the Vista Windows/system32 folder and copy it into the XP Windows/system32 folder. Then the Vista boot choice in the boot menu will actually boot XP.

 

Yea, I was unsuccessful. But no biggie. I reimaged my hard drive from scratch, which was overdue anyway, so perfect timing!