If you upgrade your Windows XP system to Vista, the answer to your
question is No, you cannot go back. You cannot uninstall Vista, or Restore
Windows XP.
Are you considering upgrading your production or main home machine?
Don't do it!
Microsoft says the following about Vista Beta 2:
[Begin Microsoft warning]
Note: This is beta code and should not be used in a production environment
or on a main machine in the home. Beta 2 is intended for developers, IT
professionals and technology experts to continue or begin their testing of
Windows Vista. Before you decide to use Beta 2, you should feel comfortable
with installing operating systems, updating drivers, and general PC
troubleshooting. Some risks of using beta operating systems include hardware
and software incompatibility and system instability. If you have concerns
about installing this beta software on your computer, we encourage you to
obtain the final release version of Windows Vista when it is available in
2007.
[End Microsoft warning]
You should not upgrade a production or main home machine.
If you do decide to upgrade a Windows XP installation with
Vista Beta 2, you must, at a minimum, back-up all data, and it would be
better to image your drive. And if you image your hard drive, ask your self
if you know how to make an image and restore it. In many cases computers
cannot be restored from images, because the images were not made correctly.
I blame the imaging software for this. If someone sells imaging software,
it should not depend on a first time user intuiting the exact correct
procedure. But it does. So even if you make an image, copy the data too.
And backups must not be stored on the same partition that you are going to
install Vista on. At a minimum they must be on another partition, and
really they shouldn't be on the same computer. Put the backups on DVDs,
tapes, external hard drives, or on other computers.
Better than upgrading your XP operating system is doing a clean install to
another partition (dual booting), and better than that, is getting a new
hard drive, and putting your old hard drive with your data on it in a drawer
where it will be safe. If you want to upgrade your system, you could use
the copy utility that most drive manufacturers supply, to copy your
operating system from your old disk to the new disk. Then you would have
all your data for testing, and when Vista ate your data, you could just pull
the old drive out of the drawer, and be back in business.
If you do a clean install to another partition, you are still not out of the
woods. Vista does not use boot.sys. It installs its own boot manager to
your XP partition. To go back to XP, you will have to either edit the boot
manager to remove Vista and point it to XP, or delete it and restore the XP
boot.sys.
A number of people have reported that they could not find the boot.sys file.
So before upgrading, backup your XP boot.sys file.
If you are still considering upgrading your XP system to Vista go through
some of the other posts from people who have lost all their data.
To summarize
Don't upgrade a production or main home machine. Do a clean install to
another partition.
If you decide to upgrade a production or main home machine back it up first.
Back up the data, and then do an image.
A new hard drive is better. Remove your old hard drive from the system to
protect it.
