How to undo failed install

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Colon_Terminus

XP was running just fine on this computer.
Thought I'd investigate the buzz about Windows Vista.
Bought Windows Vista Ultimate Edition at my local WalMart.

Installed Vista on a seperate NTFS partition.
When Vista first booted up it ran Chkdsk on my XP partition .. dunno why.

After running Chkdsk it looked as if Vista was going to start up but it
never did.
It stalled on a blank screen. I left it there overnite and it never
progressed.

When I reset/restart I get the option to boot "Previous Version of Windows".
I select that option and XP begins to start up.
After about 60 seconds I see a Dialog box "Logging off".
This is followed by an endless loop: "Saving Your Settings" then "Closing
Network Connections".

Here's what I want to do:
I DO NOT wish to pursue Windows Vista any further.
I wish to remove Vista and its Boot Manager.
After that I'm fairly certain I can repair my XP installation.

Will someone please advise me on how to remove Vista and Bootmgr?
 
Thanks Mark, that did the trick. I'm writing this from my recovered XP
install.

Here's what happened:
When I partitioned the drive, I made several partitions for planned
Operating Systems.
A small primary C drive as the Page file, logical D for Win2K, E for XP, F
for Vista etc.
All those partitions were formatted FAT32.
I installed Win2K first on drive D. Next I installed XP.
What I didn't notice at that time was that the drive letters didn't, for
some reason, correspond to phisycal partitions. Partition 1 was C, partition
2 was D, partition 4 was E (!) and partition 3 was F. I have no idea why.
When I iunstalled Vista, it conmplained about the partition being FAT32 so I
used it to reformat the drive as NTFS ... that's when the drive letters
changed! Now XP which thought it was on E was actually on F and Vista which
thought it was on F was, in fact, on E. Neither would boot. Fortunately,
Win2K would still boot.
When I finally got this mess figured out I cloned F to E, changed boot.ini
so XP pointed to the correct physical partition and ... Voila! XP boots just
fine.

So now I'm gonna format F as NTFS and do a reinstall of Vista there. It
should go smoothly.

Thanks again for your help. I didn't know what Fixboot did, I thought it was
the same thing as Fdisk /MBR ... obviously it does more.


Mark L. Ferguson said:
Boot to XP setup CD. Choose 'r' not ENTER, to go to the Recovery Console
prompt. Use the commands :

fixboot

then:

bootcfg /rebuild

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Mark L. Ferguson

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