Vista has become unstable & can't uninstall

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Guest

Hello,
I installed Vista as a dual boot on a XP Pro PC. Vista is on a larger
and separate hard drive apart from the C. Things were fine. I added the
Office and IE Betas on the system. Although my graphics card is the one
factor not meeting standards, the OS still displays beautifully.
Back to the problem. I have a TV tuner installed on the XP OS and attempted
(unsuccessfully) to install the card on Vista as well. Since then, the
entire computer has become unstable. Upon booting, the dual boot screen
no longer displays and it goes straight to Vista with an unstable,
rapidly flickering screen that then attempts to provide a sign-on
screen, finally resting to a display to switch user (there's only one).
The red restart menu flickers as well when I attempt to reboot and I
can't choose any thing. Repeatedly, I've shut the computwer down
manually, just turning it off, and re-started to setup, trying every
setting to no avail.
I am at this point ready to uninstall. I tried booting from the Vista
disk to do this, but the disk didn't respond. My XP Pro
is now very difficult to start-up and occasionally demonstrates that
same flickering. I don't want to even turn it off now that I've got it
back to XP but what should I do now?
HELP!!! Should I uninstall via Explorer or...???
Thanks so much in advance. I'd love to keep testing Vista,
but.............
Donna Weber
 
I have a few concerns. 1: the IE 7 beta is for XP, Vista has it's own make.
So don't download the IE 7 program to install on Vista. 2: I am interrupting
that your graphics card worked, but not the tv turner? How did you try to
install the tv turner? through Vista, or did you download a update from the
manufacturer? Now Vista is on a seperate physical hard drive? or just a
different partition? If on the same hard drive, but seperate partition, then
do this.

1: Go to Control Panel, Administative Tools, Computer Management.

2: (In computer management) go to Disk Management

3: Find the partition that vista is on, and wipe it (right-click and delete
partition)

4: Insert XP disk, and reboot, and boot off of the XP disk

5: Once all of the drivers from the disk are loaded, type 'R' for repair

6. (I've never actually used the Recovery Console) when you get to a command
line, type fixmbr

7. Hopefully everything will be repaired.

Everything 'should' be ok after that. Shout back if not.
 
Thanks for the reply. Vista is installed on a seperate 120 gig drive. Since
this is my primary PC, I didn't want to take chances with a partition. I
believe I installed the correct IE, but can't swear to it since I can't
logon.
The graphics card does work, but not the TV tuner. I tried installing the
tuner (Norwood) from the CD provided. I'm sure that was a mistake at this
point.
Unfortunately, I'm not at the computer right now, so I haven't tried Disk
management yet. I did go into setup and made sure the boot drive was C.
That didn't work. Then I changed the primary boot to the CD-Rom drive, but
that didn't work either. I basically have to go through the various
mechanics repeatedly (set-up, booting from XP CD) and eventually get XP to
startup. Have not used Disk management yet.
Unfortunately, I didn't cancel automatic updates last time I was on, so it
processed and restarted itself and I'm back to square one. Fortunately, I am
networked and have been able to access both drives and am backing up docs via
my laptop.
Once I get on again, I doubt if the restore/rollback function will affect
the alternate drive, but I can use Explorer to just delete it's content, but
would that resolve the boot problem? I am definately both cautious and
frustrated, but am learning a few important lessons, indeed.
Thanks in advance, again,
Donna

~~~~~~~~~~
 
I would recommend backing up all of your files to a network share, a external
hard drive, or a pin drive (memory stick 'usb'). Same procedure would apply
with a slave drive. Go into disk management, delete the Vista partition, and
boot off of the XP disk, type 'R' for repair and type fixmbr. Worst case
scenario, you would have to start from scratch. But fixing the master boot
record, and XP should do it.
 
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