Anyway Of Reverting To Xp?

Legacy_user

I installed Vista lastweek, I upgraded and it said my XP installation would be kept in Windows.old Is there any way of reverting to it?

thomas01155

Format the computer and install xp i don't think its possible to downgrade to xp while keeping all the files. Whats wrong with vista?

Unstoppable_2

Why the hell would you want to revert to an 8 year old operating system? Just learn to use Vista. You've paid for it so it seems a bit daft not to.

angel00079

Someone at work had a similar problem, however they had installed Vista over the XP partition as opposed to upgrading. I used the following guide (courtesy of http://neosmart.net/blog/2006/so-you-overwrote-your-xp) and 30 minutes later I had recovered their laptop back to XP (it was as if Vista had never been on the laptop) with no problems.

"The first thing that needs to be done is to copy the files required to boot into XP from another computer or from the Vista partition itself to the Windows.old directory we talked about earlier. In order to do this, you will need to enable the viewing of both hidden and OS-protected system files and folders in the Folders | Options menu. These files are:
1. \ntldr
2. \NTDETECT.COM
3. \MSDOS.SYS
4. \CONFIG.SYS
5. \AUTOEXEC.BAT
6. \boot.ini (if available) Once you've copied those files over, we need to delete the Vista bootloader from the bootsector. There are two ways to do this, one is to use EasyBCD, the ultimate Vista Bootloader Modification Tool that NeoSmart Technologies published, and the other is to use a program that comes with Vista, called "bootsect.exe." Since this guide uses no external resources, here's how to do it with bootsect.
You'll need to burn Vista to a DVD (well, ATM you can just mount or extract it, but later on in these steps you're going to need to burn it, so might as well do it now) with your favorite ISO burning program (Nero, Roxio, DT, Alcohol, you name it).
Browse to the \Boot\ folder on the DVD, and grab "bootsect.exe" and copy it to your drive C:\ in the root folder.
Press winkey+r to open a run prompt, type in "CMD" without the quotes, and press enter.
Once the command prompt window is open, type the following (after each line, press enter):
C:
cd \
bootsect.exe /nt52 all /force
exit Make sure your Vista DVD is in the drive, and restart your computer.
Making sure that your BIOS is set to boot from CD/DVD (either by pressing F12 for a boot menu or entering the BIOS setup and giving the DVD Drive priority over the HDD, boot into the Vista DVD by pressing something on the keyboard when prompted.
When you're presented the screen with "Install Now" button in blue, don't click it, rather click a tiny link in the bottom-left corner that will take you to an advanced options screen.
From the advanced options screen select the drive with Vista on it, and then proceed to open a command prompt Window.
Once the command prompt window is open, type the following in, exactly as I wrote it, but substituting C: for whatever letter your Vista partition is.
c:
cd \
ren boot boot.vista
ren Windows Windows.vista
ren Users Users.vista
ren "Program Files" "Program Files.vista"
ren "Config.Msi" "Config.Msi.vista"
ren "Documents and Settings" "Documents and Settings.vista"
ren MSOCache MSOCache.vista
ren ProgramData ProgramData.vista
ren Recycled Recycled.vista
ren * *.vista
xcopy Windows.old\* c:\ /E /C /I /G /H /R /K /Y
ren Windows.old Windows.old.vista
exit With that, all Vista-related files have been given a .vista extension, so they don't get in our way and conflict with XP, and so you can recover them later on if you realize you forgot something. Please note that the third-to-last step will take a long time; that's perfectly normal. Whatever you do, don't stop it!
Close the Advanced Options screen and exit windows setup.
Reboot your PC.
If all went well, you should be back in XP, shocked at the relative ease of getting back, and ready to install Vista again - after properly backing up all your data of course!"