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Vista deletion
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 Re: Vista deletion
Posted by RedWood on Thu Apr 17th at 4:14am 2008

Ok, my friend bought a new Acer laptop and wants to delete vista from it. I say cool brig it over. i download boot and nuke (disk wipeing program) and run it. It doesn't seem to work. We (i) run it several times and every time it runs the entire prosses takes a total of 5 seconds. I know it takes longer than 5 seconds to rewrite a hard drive and its telling me it completed the task.

Ok, screw it. i only wanted to use boot and nuke to totaly demolish vista out of principle anyway. I decide to just toss in the xp disk and let it reformat it. Bla bla bla, everything is going normal. "hit enter to install xp"..."ERROR, NO HARD DISK DETECTED" wtf. I pull out the xp disk, reset the boot order and restart the machine. vista loads with no problem. The hard disk works. I don't know why i can't install xp.

My friend is hoping on a plain in a few days to go out of town and i have no time to sift and through the internet any more than i all ready have, do to the fact that i have a 10 page paper due in 3... now 2 days.

If anyone hear can help me/us i would really appreciate it.


Reality has become a commodity.



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 Re: Vista deletion
Posted by Crono on Thu Apr 17th at 4:38am 2008

Did you try just deleting all the partitions through FDisk? XP will build it's own partition when you install it.


Blame it on Microsoft, God does.



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 Re: Vista deletion
Posted by RedWood on Thu Apr 17th at 4:53am 2008

Thank u for the quick reply.
While my knowledge of hardware has become quite good my software skill are poor at best.
This is the first i have herd of fdisk. how do i enter it? Also, if its important, I can't seem to access dos on this machine. every time i exit the bios it restarts its self and goes into windows.

Double post:

it seams u became frustrated with my ignorance. <img src=" SRC="images/smiles/icon_lol.gif"> (so am i)

Like a true genius i googled the error verbatim... I didn't find a exact solution to my problem but saw something i recognized in the bios. Turns out i had to change the way the hard disk was recognized by switching it form "AHCI" to ATA. "Your system proabaly came set to "RAID Autodetect / AHCI" - THIS SETTING CAUSES YOUR SYSTEM TO GO INTO AN IDE LOOP AND DOESN'T ALLOW IT TO FIND YOUR FACTORY INSTALLED SATA DRIVE."
The hd is formating now.

Sorry i wasted your time Crono. I was posting out of hurried desperation.

Off to bed for me now so i can wake up early and do a solid 18 hours of home work... still not enough...


Reality has become a commodity.



Quote
 Re: Vista deletion
Posted by omegaslayer on Thu Apr 17th at 6:20am 2008

What are the specs of the machine? If its a quad core Xp won't recognize the CPU.


Posting And You



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 Re: Vista deletion
Posted by Crono on Thu Apr 17th at 7:53am 2008

Dude ... I wasn't on the site ... it was merely a coincidence that I was on right after you made the topic (if you call 25 minutes quick, that is).

Glad it's resolved.

FDisk is a Microsoft utility used on many of their boot discs. It's one thing they've made that's actually really nice for removing all sorts of partitions.

Dos hasn't been natively used since Windows 98. It's been emulated since then, so you can't boot into Dos ... You need to use a boot disc of some kind (pretty easy to make). I know, in particular, the Windows ME disc is a boot disc and has Fdisk.

I think you can find Fdisk online too. There's many "ultimate boot disc" compilations out there with ridiculous amounts of tools for recovery and such.


Blame it on Microsoft, God does.



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 Re: Vista deletion
Posted by Le Chief on Thu Apr 17th at 8:42am 2008

Doesn't machines with vista pre-installed have something on it so you can't downgrade?


Aaron's Stuff



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 Re: Vista deletion
Posted by reaper47 on Thu Apr 17th at 9:02am 2008

? quote:
Doesn't machines with vista pre-installed have something on it so you can't downgrade?


You gotta be kidding me!


Why snark works.



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 Re: Vista deletion
Posted by Le Chief on Thu Apr 17th at 12:47pm 2008

I don't know :P. Do they?


Aaron's Stuff



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 Re: Vista deletion
Posted by RedWood on Thu Apr 17th at 3:06pm 2008

Looks like i was assuming to much. Thanks Crono. I'll remember the FDISK thing.

Their might be versions of vista that wont let u use a upgrade to xp disk, but if u wipe the drive there's not crap they can do.


Reality has become a commodity.



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 Re: Vista deletion
Posted by Natus on Thu Apr 17th at 3:49pm 2008

There's still a chance that your hardware doesn't have any xp drivers, that's the case with my laptop anyway, luckily there are 3rd party drivers out there.



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 Re: Vista deletion
Posted by Crono on Thu Apr 17th at 11:25pm 2008

? quote:
Doesn't machines with vista pre-installed have something on it so you can't downgrade?


Ah, not specifically, no. However, some manufacturers put proprietary formats on the HDD (at a very low level) so that even if you delete the partitions and wipe the drive you will not be able to re-install anything (HP does this, they call it HPFS or HPNTFS).

It's very annoying when you come across something like that.

However, "rolling back" or "downgrading" implies that you can go into Vista or put in the XP disc and downgrade it back to XP ... for that to happen XP had to be installed at some point, which is not the case on pre-loaded machines. (They install it once on each hardware configuration then make an image ... they then have a factory line unpacking the image onto several drives, each of which get popped into a computer and tested.)


Blame it on Microsoft, God does.



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 Re: Vista deletion
Posted by Orpheus on Thu Apr 17th at 11:44pm 2008

There's a lesson here somewhere methinks..

DON'T GET A MACHINE WITH A NAME ON THE COVER!

I learned my lesson ages ago. It sucks to have to wait on a new machine, or one you will build, but it beats the hell out of buying one at the local discount computer store.

Rule of thumb: They are in the business to sell you a PC. They are not in the market to sell you the best machine, just a machine. Avoid name brands.





The best things in life, aren't things.



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 Re: Vista deletion
Posted by wil5on on Fri Apr 18th at 5:36am 2008

I agree there, but you dont have much choice with laptops. Good to see you back Orph.


&quot;If you talk at all during this lesson, you have detention. Do you understand?&quot;
- My yr11 Economics teacher



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 Re: Vista deletion
Posted by Orpheus on Fri Apr 18th at 10:44am 2008

True enough Master Wilson. I have been looking into buying a laptop for the road. I have need of one to find addresses. Its rather hard to find your destination at times since very few people actually put their address on their buildings anylonger. <img src=" SRC="images/smiles/sad.gif">

Till recently I had no need for a lappy and have never given it much thought. However now I find that I cannot seem to locate one without a name on it....

Course, I am so out of touch, I cannot even sort out the newer processors yet so I guess first things first is to do that then look into buying it.

I am leaning however to getting one used since other than looking up addresses, I have no need for it. Also, I cannot seem to locate one without Vista installed.

Anywho's, thanx for the salute. <img src=" SRC="images/smiles/icon_smile.gif">





The best things in life, aren't things.




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