XP to original state. Affect Vista?

Hi all,

First off, I have come to the board with many questions, some good and some dumb, but I have always been able to find the answers I was looking for. I thank you all for your patience and information.

I have a new dilemma now. I installed SP3 (XP) a while back and it messed up my system. I tried everything that I could think of to repair this issue, including running system restore, but nothing has worked to rectify the problems I'm having. I had been toying with the idea of doing a clean install, but I recently decided to just use the recovery discs I made to restore the system to it's original state, as the bloatware never really bothered me before and I also would not have to worry about finding the drivers and all that. On a second hard drive in the same PC, I have Windows Vista running. My question is simple. Would attempting to return XP to its original factory state affect the second hard drive (Vista) in any way? I ask because I have heard stories about the computer not recognizing one or the other if they're not installed in the correct order. For instance, I have heard that computers that originally had XP on them failed to recognize Vista and vice versa if the owner tried to do a clean install of the original operating system after adding the new one. I don't know if that's true or if it even makes any sense. Does anyone know if there is any truth to any of this? Does anyone know if attempting to "restore" XP will have any adverse affects on the second hard drive? By the way, in case I wasn't too incredibly clear, XP was the original operating system that came with the PC. I later added a second hard drive and put Vista Ultimate on it. If I omitted any more information, please feel free to ask.

I thank any and all who can answer this question.

 

No,you'll only be dealing with the XP partition, since you'll be asked where you want it installed .
However, since we are talkin MS stuff here, I suggest you BACKUP VISTA before doing anything, just in case, It doesn't take long and it's the best sollution anyone can give you.

Though I have not heard personally about this, it might have to do with AHCI(throwing guesses here) which works by default in Vista,whereas XP needs drivers,but since you use factory restore ones,it shouldn't be a problem.

BACKUP Vista for absolute safety, or clone that disk , and afterwards install XP.
And it might actually be better to do a fresh instal and move on to SP3 like that.

 

Thanks, Eleron. I appreciate you taking the time to respond. I have already backed up Vista. I was still just afraid to make any moves before getting a few opinions . . . or, in this case, just one.

P.S. By the way, what do you think about me unplugging the second hard drive as one final precautionary step?

 

It's a slight possibility that it may do something to the master boot record. Have your Vista disk handy if you need to repair it, or you can use EasYBCD to do the same thing.

EDIT: since you have 2 discs I don't think there will be a problem, but it's good to have your install disk just in case.

 

What do you think about completely disconnecting the second hard drive?

 

Disconnect the second drive.

 

Yep,disconnecting the second drive would eliminate any possibility of messing up the vista partition.

 

I thank you both.

 

Still, the recovery partition puts XP and have to make XP to start so it writes to the MBR..so I think it doesn't matter if the second hdd is connected, it will write to the MBR and probably mess up with Vista start up..if it were the opposite way(Vista Recovery) probably not..but older OS writing to the MBR and save the newer OS start up..Probably not.

I hope I'm not right though..

 

When you say "mess up with Vista start up," what exactly do you mean? I installed Vista after already having XP on my system and my computer automatically made Vista the default OS. I didn't even need to download any boot managers or anything.

 

There is no way you will mess with Vista, especially that it is in another drive. However once you load XP in the other drive, you will need a boot manager, http://www.vistabootpro.org/ is a good one, you may have to open the Vista boot.ini to ad a line declaring the xp as the second drive though.

 

I guess that's the thing that's kind of confusing me now, though. Why didn't I have to do any of that after I added Vista to my system? Why would I have to do it now?

 

What is the big deal body? You have Vista in HDD0, and have XP in HDD1, now instead of always playing around with the BIOS and changing the booting sequence depending which OS you want to work with, just leave Vista in the first booting place and install a booting manager, that's simple.

There could be another way just modifying the boot.ini, but then you have to ask the experts on that.

 

There's no problem. I would just like to know why I'm doing certain things before I do them. That's really the only way to learn, right? I could just do everything you all are telling me to do, but without really knowing why, then I don't feel like I'm learning anything in the process. That's the only reason I keep asking questions.

I don't get why I would have to adjust boot.ini's and all that if I didn't have to do it the first time. Eventually, though, I will do whatever I have to do to get things to work. Sorry if I'm wasting anyone's precious time.

 

You are not wasting our time, is Sunday, hehehe.

The application VistaBootpro 3.3 will take care of all that.

 

Okay. Thanks. With VistaBootpro 3.3, I won't need to go into BIOS or change any boot.ini files, correct?

 

That's correct. But again, if you feel insecure, then don't do anything.

 

The problem is, that newer OS like Vista, installed AFTER XP will detect older version of Windows. On the other hand recovery is putting XP and XP doesn't know that Vista(newer OS) exist. And if somehow could detect Vista in normal installation mode, I doubt the Recovery process will search of any other OS installed. That's why it will overwrite MBR and you have to use boot manager.

 

No matter of what you will put the OS cd on the cd drive, then at boot the BIOS will understand that you are trying to install an OS, then since you have two drives you should be given the choice which drive is the OS destination. If this doens't happens, remove the Vista drive and go through the process again.

I installed Ubuntu in my second drive, and not to break my head, I removed the Vista drive and installed Ubuntu in the second drive, then I used Brug as boot manager and it works perfectly.

So, you will need a boot manager if you want to boot through a menu that will give you the OS's choices as you boot the laptop.

 

This makes absolute sense. Thanks.