Help! Want to safely remove Vista from 2nd drive...

frogman_2

...and I have checked to see if this has been covered!

I have an IDE drive with Win XP/SP3 which is working just fine. However, I tried out Vista on a new SATA drive last year but have decided to go back to Win XP for the time being.

Now I'd like to totally and safely remove the Vista install from my SATA drive but (as I did not create it's own partition) I cannot just do a format...I know, I know but I won't do it again.

So, I have read that I can just delete the Windows/Program Files/Users folders if I can figure out how to set the permissions. But I don't know if this is the best solution and I'm looking for the safest, simplest way of totally removing Vista.

Any recommendations/tips would be gratefully received!

TIA!

nick.simpson19

I dont understand fully, you have a ide drive with win xp on and you bought another drive which you installed vista on?

the drive that vista is on has stuff on it you want to keep right~?

hence why you dont want to format it?

frogman_2

Correct!

Stoopid, I know...I just didn't think that one through...

nick.simpson19

what sort of files do you want to keep? just music, photos etc?

Could you not copy the files over to the hard drive were windows xp is installed then format the sata drive?

or is the drive on xp too small?

frogman_2

Correct again! You're batting 2 for 2...

I moved all my music, photos, etc. and now these files are too big to move off to the IDE...of course, I could always buy another drive...just wanted to wait till prices came down a little further...

nick.simpson19

ok ok you must have a lot of data too move. what about backing up to dvd?

The only way is to format to completely remove vista propperly.

I would defo back up your photos to dvd as these are easily lost, i learnt the hard way and lost all pictures from when my daughter was born. I got them in the end by putting my hard drive in a nother computer and running this prog i found on the net.

frogman_2

No, it's not that much just thought the easiest thing to do would be to recover the 8-10Gb that Vista seems to take up...

You are right; I should back the photos up - I can always get the music again...probably get an external hard drive as well as DVDs.

Any other ideas apart from formatting the drive?

nick.simpson19

remove them manually, but personally ide back up as much as i could and then format the drive that way you know vista is completely gone. Otherwise you will have loads of stuff still left on the drive from vista,

What size are both drives? Im assuming your computer aint that old has you have sata connectionS?

TheFlyingGerbil

Could you create another partition on the sata drive, move your personal files there and then delete everything on the Vista partition (don't format though!).

nick.simpson19

yeah its possible with a program like partition magic. I never bother with partitions etc but you possibly could do it like that i suppose you got nothing to lose

frogman_2

Should have done that earlier...past the point of no return ie. less space on SATA than required.

I might just delete the Windows/Program Files/Users folders and see what happens...just don't want to screw up the rest of the system! I thought there must be a simple way of removing/uninstalling Vista but I think with modern PCs that's difficult to do...