Uninstalling xp pro revisited

[grandad]

Hi there. Thanks for letting me in among so great a crowd of knowledgeable experts. I was asked by a friend to uninstall xp pro from his computer. It is not a legal copy and was not truly wanted in the first place. To my horror there is no uninstall facility which I thought strange. But I have been reading questions and answers on here and seemed to understand that if I was to change the boot sequence in the bios to CDROM I could them insert my friends Win 98 disk and it would install this over xp pro. Hmmm I wonder if it really is so simple?

Could anyone spare a few minutes to put this old codger right and maybe point the way to getting rid of xp and letting my friend get back to using software he knows all about. I think the only reason he was unhappy is because there are odd lines running horizontally across everything he views. This did not happen when he was running win 98. Personally I think his display is not VGA and his processor too slow for xp. He has plenty of memory but his hard drive is only 7megabyte capacity.

I know he would appreciate any help you can give to him via me as he is not on the Internet. Many Many thanks. Grandad.

[rjfvillarosa]

Changing the boot sequence in the BIOS to boot from the CD rom first is the way to go, but you are likely to run into conflicts with Windows telling you that a newer version already exists.
The best thing to do, if there is no information on the hard drive that he wants to keep, establish the manufacturer of the hard drive, download the manufacturer's diagnostic utility and run a low level format. This will fill the drive with zero's, effectively wiping it clean and restoring it to it's original state, then using a Windows 98 boot disk, boot from the floppy and select "start the computer with CD support" at the "A" prompt you will be able to change the directory to the CD containing the Windows 98 disk and run "SETUP.EXE" and Windows will install.
If you don't have a Windows 98 boot disk you can either make one on a machine running 98/ME or download one from www.bootdisk.com

[casual01]

You can still format the hard drive from the cd. Change the bios like you were going to and let it boot from your Windows 98 cd. Take the option to boot from cd, then to start the pc with cd drivers. You will get an A: prompt(you are actually on the cd). From there you can run fdisk from the cd and remove any partitions. Reboot from the cd again, only this time, take the option to run setup from the cd and follow the instructions and setup will repartition the drive for you.

[grandad]

Hello again. At the age of 72 I have long since ceased to be amazed, but this time you lovely experts have really shaken me. I have taken note of your advice and will certainly put it into practice as soon as I can get back to my friends home. Let me just thank you all once again for such a speedy and caring response to a cry for help. Every blessing to you all. Grandad