Vista back to XP

[Needtoknow]

Hello,
I have a poor soul wants to get the Vista off his new Dell and install XP Pro.

I have read several different methods, but we have just booted to the XP cd and reformatted and partitioned as normal XP install and it seems to be going fine...

Waiting for files to load...am I okay here or in for a rude M$ awakening when he goes to reboot at the end of the install??


Also, he messed with the BIOS before I got involved and keeps getting the message like it's trying to boot to the flopp (there is no floppy) and then "hit f1 to continue"
I assume he can just revert to fail safe and that will fix it... but my real concern is the Vista/XP question.

Thanks for your help as always..

Hal

[shadowpr]

XP should load fine. The only problem might be with drivers. He will have to find all the xp drivers for that model, which may or may not be difficult.

As for how to eliminate the floppy problem, just go into the bios and disable the boot from floppy. It should be possible to remove it completely, and that should help.

[David M]

The most certain way I know of is to wipe the drive clean and load XP from scratch. XP MUST be loaded before Vista. Microsoft made sure you could not downgrade to XP if you already have Vista.

You might consider a dual boot computer this time. Vista in my experience is not bad at all and in some cases does things better than XP

[Statica]

Personally, I'm beginning to like a Virtual PC'd XP or Vista a lot better than dual booting. It reduces a lot of redundant software installations and the hassle of rebooting.

[Needtoknow]

Hey all.
Actually, it went fine.
I managed to load XP per normal- booted to disc and partitioned and went on from there.
It loaded XP over Vista and all was well except we lost the drivers for the network, ethernet and stuff like that, but we burned them to a disc off another box with internet connection and loaded them and were up and running in no time.

The other little prob was exactly that- he had managed to change the BIOS somehow to seek a floppy a drive on startup- I changed that settings and he was amazed ;)
I showed him how simple it was and he was intrigued with the process of working on 'puters.
He is a bicycle guy about to open his own shop,that's what the box with XP is for so he agreed to build my eleven year old a bike in exchange for my help..

Works for me.

Thanks for your help... live and learn.

Sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you.

Hal