Can not uninstall or format my drive, need some help.....

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G

Guest

I want to go back to regular XP. But, When I insert my XP cd and reboot, my
keyboard is not booted in time to press a key to boot from CD. And my floppy
drive will not work in vista, so no start up disk. How can I force a
format????
 
brmcco said:
I want to go back to regular XP. But, When I insert my XP cd and reboot, my
keyboard is not booted in time to press a key to boot from CD. And my floppy
drive will not work in vista, so no start up disk. How can I force a
format????
Click to expand...

are you getting a message on the screen that says "press any key to boot
from CD"? or is your system booting straight into Vista eventhough you
restarted the computer with the XP installation CD in the CD drive?

and if you do have a USB keyboard do what Jane suggested.
 
You need to either be really fast (hold down arrow key before the boot
finishes) or download a Vista Bootmanager editor. The boot manager's default
is 3 seconds, so you don't have much time! Why they chose such a short period
is beyond me!
 
It turns out that during a failed installation attempt of Vista, something
is written on the hard drive (possibly a boot manager) that hinders the
"Boot from DVD" capability. I am currently looking for some software to
either change the partition status to inactive, or something that will
remove or change the lingering "boot manager". If anyone knows of something
that will run in Vista, please advise.

If you aren't worried about loosing data, you can use Fdisk to delete the
partition and then recreate it without making it active and then try
reinstalling Vista. If the partition on the hard drive is not active, the
DVD will be booted without having to hit a key.

Clark
 
Vista automatically install the Vista Boot Manager on the Active HD, no
matter which HD you attempt to install Vista on. By default the Vista Boot
Manager has a 3 second delay before autmatically attempting to boot to the
most recent Vista install [Default] (whether it worked or not). While you are
booting the machine just hold down the up or down arrow keys (not just a
single press) before you see anything. Once the Boot Manager is active you
can select "Previous Version of Windows" from the menu and boot into XP. From
there download and install VistaBootPro from www.vistabootpro.org. That
program will allow you to change the default OS and change the time from 3
seconds.
 
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