How to get rid of Vista without reformating

  • Thread starter Thread starter Tom Kolakowski
  • Start date Start date
T

Tom Kolakowski

I have 3 uncompleted installs on my PC and I really don't want to go
through the pain of moving files and reformating a 160gig HD just to get
rid of Vista. I tried installing Vista x64 on a HD without Windows and
after copying the files it reboots to a black screen. I can boot to XP
without a problem but have these 3 useless Vistas I can't get to finish
installing. You would think that MS would at least have so way of
getting rid of the program when it can't install!
 
XP type in Run in ..msconfig goto the boot ini tag & select XP as your
default OS
XP will remove all the useless boots created , when you reboot
 
Xibit said:
XP type in Run in ..msconfig goto the boot ini tag & select XP as your
default OS
XP will remove all the useless boots created , when you reboot
Click to expand...

msconfig only shows WinXP and says to use BCDEDIT.EXE for Vista, but I
can't use it.
 
To get ride of the Vista operating system files, just delete them.

To get rid of the boot files, boot off your XP CD and fixup your boot files.
 
whoops yeah i forgot to mention that , delete all Vista files the when you
reboot
Xp will remove the useless boots

peace Xibit
 
I tried installing Vista 32-bit and got the same errors, at least when I
rebooted to XP it says "Windows Vista cannot be installed on this computer.
Next time run Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor". Which I did before hand. It
says Vista can run in the Advisor, but said that my Network adapter was
unknown (nForce410 based on-board). I was thinking of disconnecting my XP
drive, try to install and see if it is just a conflict with XP.
 
All you have to do is delete the files from the three drives you tried to
install onto. If you formatted the drives with Vista, they should be
backward compatible with the older versions of NTFS, but since the Vista
install does a quick format, caution is advised. Best just to delete the
partitons and reformat.
 
All are on the same drive 2 have the .old extension. I cannot delete the
directories in windows XP as they are "system" files and I cannot change the
flags. I deleted 2 via the Vista command prompt, but Vista still thinks they
are there. I deleted the Vista Boot manager and did and XP Fixboot, but
instead I get a Vista error that the Boot manager is missing. So I had to try
and reinstall Vista to boot into XP (Vista still fails).
 
you are relying to much on Vista my friend , Vista RC1 is not an OS yet !
we can obviously see that there are still many problems , so dont expect
Vista to handle problems

is XP still running normally ??? if not , it looks like your going to have
to format & reinstall XP ...i dont think system restore will get you back to
normal

peace Xibit
 
I had to reinstall Vista so I could get to a command prompt and erase all
the Vista files. XP will not let you delete Vista or even change the file
attributes. Once I cleaned out the three Vista directories I could then
delete the Vista Boot Manager... reboot to the XP repair consule and then do
a fixboot to get things back to the pre-Vista install. It is hard and time
consuming to fix ... but I am now back to where I was before trying to
install RC1.

I would say the only real complaint I have (besides not being able to
install RC1) is the difficulty of getting rid of Vista when it cannot
install.

One thing I think could hurt MS is that there are so many of us that are
having the same problems and MS hasn't addressed (or even acknowledged) the
problems. I am usually the first in line to buy a new MS O/S.... but based on
the problems I have encountered here (and the utter lack of MS support) I
doubt I will switch until I am completely sure it will install!
 
It shouldn't have been that hard, it is the fixmbr that changes the pointers
to the xp boot process (ntldr) from Vista, and both VistaBootPro and
EasyBCD do it very easily.
 
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