Uninstall Vista

  • Thread starter Thread starter Chuck
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Chuck

I installed Vista Beta 2 getting a dual booting system. Worked well. After
"playing" with Vista, I decided that it was time to uninstall. I could find
no place to do this. I accessed a Microsoft group for advise. Several MVPs
assisted me in trying to do this. Bottom line, I needed to re-install XP Pro
SP2. This was to fix the dual-boot situation. That worked, however, there
are more problems that resulted.

Login always reverts to Guest and will not accept a BLANK password. I have
never used a Guest account.
I have to type in Administrator and then the Blank PW works. At least I can
get in.

First stop was Control Panel to User. Up came a blank window. No writing
anywhere.

Tried running IE. Could not find ieframe.dll A search found it in the
system32 directory. MVPs suggested going to Add/Remove and click on Updates.
Not listed. Tried installing IE 6. Would not allow because of a newer
version.

Tried deleting the directories in the Vista windows directory. Denied
because the files were in use or I did not have permission.

Any suggestions or help would be appreciated.

TIA

Chuck
 
Well, you can't uninstall Vista I'm afraid, all you can do is reinstall
Windows XP from a boot CD then format the drive, then apply SP2 back onto it
(unless your XP disk is slipstreamed with SP2).

Sorry :o(

--
Zack Whittaker
» ZackNET Enterprises: www.zacknet.co.uk
» MSBlog on ResDev: www.msblog.org
» Vista Knowledge Base: www.vistabase.co.uk
» This mailing is provided "as is" with no warranties, and confers no
rights. All opinions expressed are those of myself unless stated so, and not
of my employer, best friend, Ghandi, my mother or my cat. Glad we cleared
that up!

--: Original message follows :--
 
Thanks. Did all that. XP SP2 is what I used. The other problems exist after
doing that. Any thoughts, suggestions? The MVPs the first time around had a
discussion amongst themselves about the uninstall process. Bottom line, you
are right.

Chuck
 
Chuck,

I would suggest that you use a stand alone boot loader if you are going to
play with Beta's and multiple operating systems. This will allow you to
install the operating systems to either a primary or logical partition and
then instead of having to uninstall you just format the partition to get rid
of the Beta.

When you install Windows it will rewrite the MBR, but after installing you
can reactivate your boot loader and have access to all your other operating
systems again.

I use BootIt NG, because it allows me to have as many partitions as I want,
currently I have nine on my first hard drive, eight of which are primary
partitions, but there are a lot of other boot loaders that you can use just
do a Google search for boot loader.

Norm
 
Thanks Norm. I will investigate.

There is one saving grace in this whole scenario. I run 3 computers for
different purposes. The Beta did not go onto my primary computer. I have
never used a boot loader, I will investigate and take your advise to heart.

Chuck
 
When you boot the computer, there is a menu that asks you what to boot,
windows vista or the earlier OS. I'm not sure if that will work, but it
doesn't hurt to try
 
Actually, I suggest you download VistaBootPro and simply delete the Vista
entry from the Boot Configuration Store data. Once you are down to a single
OS on the boot options screen you will not see the screen any more. What
has changed is that Vista no longer uses the boot.ini file that Windows has
used for a dozen years.
 
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