Possible to downgrade Win 7 to Win XP?

baby_frogmella

Hi

About to sell my old desktop which has Win 7 Ultimate installed, however i will use this on my new pc so want to install Win XP (Home) from the original disk which came with the pc. When i try to boot from the recovery disk, nothing happens despite boot order set to CD drive first and also the disk being bootable. I'm thinking perhaps its impossible to downgrade to XP?

Cheers

danthemoneysavingman

you may have to press a key to ensure it boots from the CD/DVD, watch the screen as you boot up - BIOS will prompt you.

HTH

gonzo127

only thing i might be concerned about is if your windows 7 ultimate is a retail copy or a upgrade copy, if it is a upgrade copy you could find (although i dont know if microsoft do this its just possible) that your XP key is linked to your windows 7 key which could in turn mean you cant install the windows 7 again on a new system without using the xp key on the old system which could cause authentication problems with both systems

god thats rambling on a bit hope you understand thou

JasX

gonzo127 wrote: »

only thing i might be concerned about i .........(although i dont know if microsoft do this its just possible)....................

No they don't do anything that.

OP might have trouble if their upgrade version was OEM rather than RETAIL but i pity the short sightedness of anyone ever buying an OEM copy of any windows OS let alone 7 ultimate....

If in doubt format your hard disk, also use something like DBAN if you had any sensitive personal data on there you don't want recoverable -tho after a format and OS reinstall someone would need to be really trying to get at it....

gonzo127

thanks Jas, as i said really didnt know if they would do something like that but didnt think it was beyond the realms of possibility for microsoft to have some sort of program in place to screw up windows for any reason they can find

JasX

gonzo127 wrote: »

thanks Jas, as i said really didnt know if they would do something like that but didnt think it was beyond the realms of possibility for microsoft to have some sort of program in place to screw up windows for any reason they can find

Basically they keep a database of hardware 'fingerprints' for OEM versions so if too much changes hardware wise you'll not be able to activate and need to try your luck on the phone.

no real difference between upgrade or full versions, you just need ensure the upgrade version doesn't think it was clean installed and it activates fine as per OEM/RETAIL license restrictions (ie OEM as above, RETAIL = no restriction unless you have it on different machines simultaneously)

No reference is made to previous OS serial numbers its just a 1 or 0 local registry flag "was i clean installed or not"

dragon934

With the greates apologies if I'm wrong but its unlikely Win7 Ultimate is a genuine version hence why the OP wants to remove it before selling. (far worse to sell pirate windows than just own it right?)

So advice should probably be directed to the following:
Your best off formatting and installing from scratch, Upgrades and downgrades are always full of nasty surprises, so get what you need of the HDD drive and nuke it. (if your selling it you should always securely erase everything anyway, incase your buyer tries to recover bank details/personal info etc) Then install XP. but of course you need more than just a recovery disc for this. (unless its one of them full windows things that come with new PC's.) if the disc doesn't hold windows, maybe you should get WinXP from the same place you obtained Ultimate, and install your own genuine key into it.

Like I said apologies if your Ultimate version is genuine, I just thought the advice would be better you owned a pirated version and didn't know what to do

kwikbreaks

I've recently swapped a laptop back from a purchased Win7 Home to it's original OEM Vista with no problem at all. I then used the Win 7 to upgrade a Vista desktop and had to use phone activation for that but the actual installs ran flawlessly so there is nothing stopping downgrades. Info in Post #2 about pressing a special key to have the machine boot from CD is the most likely answer (with both my lappy and desktop this is F12 but I guess it varies by BIOS).

Ideally you should have taken a backup image of your machine before upgrading it if you planned to ever downgrade it as that would save possibly hours of Windows updates.

dragon934

kwikbreaks wrote: »

I've recently swapped a laptop back from a purchased Win7 Home to it's original OEM Vista with no problem at all. I then used the Win 7 to upgrade a Vista desktop and had to use phone activation for that but the actual installs ran flawlessly so there is nothing stopping downgrades.

I think XP - Win7 (or back down) is significantly less compatible than vista - win7

JasX

dragon934 wrote: »

I think XP - Win7 (or back down) is significantly less compatible than vista - win7

sorry I've been assuming we were talking format+clean install every time, any other upgrade or downgrade attempts usually result in a mess :cool:

kwikbreaks

That is what the OP is doing from my own understanding. He is talking about booting from the distribution CD in the first post and because it didn't boot asking if it's because you can't downgrade. It isn't which I why I mentioned downgrading from Win 7 myself (in my case to Vista but that is pretty much irrelevant).

I'm 99% sure that the answer lies in post #2 but as is common here others have continued pontificating despite the almost certainly correct answer having been given already.