trying to get rid of vista for xp

B

bluedragon1977

Geek Trainee
I have a dell xps 410 that came with windows vista home premium. I cant stand vista any more, i thought that i would give it a chance but after almost a year i have had it. I have tried to create a separte hard drive partition and tried to boot windows xp cd from the drive and windows starts down the install path but before it finishes i get a blue screen telling me that a problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to my comp. it says to check for viruses, which I have done and that is a negative, remove any newly installed hard drives or hard drive controllers. which i have not done either of those, check hard drive to make sure that it is properly configured and terminated, whatever that means, and to run CHKDSK /F to check for hard drive corruption, and then restart my computer. I cannot figure out how to run the CHKDSK, I am mostly computer illiterate when it comes to command prompt. Someone told me to just f disk the HD but I dont know what that means. When I am at the command prompt how do i run the chkdsk from (C:\Users\john>) if I just type in CHKDSK /F then i get a message that reads, Access Denied as you do not have sufficient privilages. You have to invoke this utility running in elavated mode. Whatever that means. Can anyone help me? I am ready to go office space on this tower but then my wife sould shoot me because I begged her to let me get a new desk top.
 
first of all let me say - :D ;

Ok, now to the problem; Why don't you go and:

[assuming that you want XP on the drive that vista is on and that you want to get rid of it completely]

1. take a spare (borrowed - whatever - HDDs ain't expensive these days) HDD and make a image or something from your current vista drive; WHY: i would think that you need some of your old data...
2. Wipe the vista drive; WHY: vista and XP will not like to live together on a single HDD
3. Install XP on the wiped HDD;
4. mount the spare HDD with the vista stuff on it as a slave and copy all neccessary data...

that's more or less it.
 
Or, burn any data you wish to keep to DVD (or backup to USB pen), when you install XP, format the whole drive and install XP then. There would be no trace of Vista!
 
Just wipe the whole drive, then do a fresh install of XP ... Why keep any
Vista left overs.. I use a Windows 98 Boot disk to wipe all my stuff..
Download a Windows 98 boot disk for CD... Then just wipe everything and
start fresh..
 
I would like to get rid of vista and start fresh but I do not know how to. I have a new copy of xp pro that i want to put on and do not want anything at all to do with vista, how do i get it to format the entire HDD. If I can get it to do that then I could reinstall the xp OS to a blank HDD correct???
 
When you click on My Computer how many drives are there ? Of course you have C: drive , but do you have a D: drive or recovery drive.. You will have too Fdisk one or both, then delete one/both drives,.. Do you have access to another
computer ?

Email me, I will help you..
 
I have both a C: and D: drives the D: is my recovery and yes I have another computer that I have access to it is my laptop that I have been posting with.
 
basically, just copy the data you wish to keep to a DVD / CD / USB pen, and download a Win98 boot disc from here

then boot from the floppy you downloaded and created & type
Code: 
fdisk c:
and delete the main primary partition (i think its option 3, but, i could be wrong)

if you only have 1 HDD there will be no option 5 in fdisk

after you have deleted the primary partition, fdisk will ask you to reboot, now, insert & boot your XP CD and let it create an NTFS file system (as NTFS has less limitations & is more secure than FAT32) and XP may ask you to reboot, after creating the NTFS partition, then continue with the XP installation
 
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