Removing 64bit Vista and replacing with 32bit

Gaijin

Gaijin

Gaijin

Soldato
Joined
18 Feb 2003
Posts
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Location
Brighton/West Wicklow
Hi chaps,

Been a bit of a wally and installed 64 bit Vista ultimate on a partition (running a dual boot with my xp pro OS) only to find that i cant get 64bit drivers for my shuttle sound and wireless yet.

As I havent activated yet I plan to get a copy of 32bit Vista Business for the time being. I ultimately want to be running a dual boot of vista 32bit business and my xp pro install.

What is the best way of removing windows vista from this partition and replacing it with 32bit vista without messing the dual boot up?

I've been looking into this new fangled BCD thing that vista has but its gone a bit over my head :confused:

Any advice would be greatly appreciated
 
Just install the 32bit version over the top. Once installed go into your windows drive and delete "windows.old" and your done :)
 
Ive had no experience with dual booting so i cant help you with that one. But as far as the installing over the top i can guarantee it works as ive done it quite recently with my new rig :)
 
Elrein said:
Ive had no experience with dual booting so i cant help you with that one. But as far as the installing over the top i can guarantee it works as ive done it quite recently with my new rig :)
Click to expand...
and your old user profiles were still there and usable?
 
NightSt@lk3r said:
and your old user profiles were still there and usable?
Click to expand...

no

there is no way to change from 32bit to 64 bit vista

all your user profiles etc.. will be gone.

the directories with their files in will still be there. in the windows.old folder

but the users wont actually be configured

its because the vista install routine is capable of taking everything to do with the old install old, stick it into c:\windows.old and install vista into C:
 
Oh dear, I tried to install 32 bit over the 64 bit and whereas it did work - its removed the dual boot. However there seems to have been some sort of corruption because the 32 bit drivers still did not work for the chipset, WLAN and audio.

What I have done is format the partition vista was initially on, reinstall Vista again (32 bit) and the drivers now work. However, I would really like to be able to dual boot back into my old XP pro instance.

Is there any way to recover the boot information? Thanks chaps
 
i believe you can. iirc you have to do the vista equivalent of the fixmbr which detects all versions of windows and repairs the bcd
 
Gaijin said:
However, I would really like to be able to dual boot back into my old XP pro instance.
Click to expand...

this is why Acronis OS Selector is good because it lets both OS'S run separately. and when u reinstall a OS it doesn't mess up the other OS...
 
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Thanks guys for your help so far.

Just to summarise:

I had Windows XP Pro installed on my computer on drive C:\ initially. I decided I would like to have Windows Vista to try out but also wished to keep my existing version of Windows XP for compatibility issues .

So when I came to install Windows Vista I chose initially the 64 bit version. (and badly I must add)

I created a new partition in partition magic called I:\ of about 20gb on which to install the Vista installation.

This went without bother.

However on reboot for the first five times or so of rebooting, the computer would not dual boot, it would just boot straight into Vista.

However after the fifth time or so, the startup strangely began to display the dual boot screen albeit with Vista as the default which I soon changed in Vista Advanced settings.

I then found that my shuttle SN26P did not fully support the 64bit version and as such the sound would not work and the WLAN adapter would not work either. Thus i decided to buy 32 bit Vista for the time being until better support came out.

I tried to install over the 64 bit version as suggested by the guys here (I dont blame you that it didnt work by the way!) and whereas it "worked" none of my 32 bit drivers would work and some werent even detected by Vista when installed! It stopped dual booting for good at this point.

So I decided to format the I:\ partition and install Vista 32 bit again onto it in order to get the 32 bit version working at least. I did this and Vista plus sound does indeed work fine.

However, no dual boot with Windows XP.

The I:\ partition is now C:\ (still 20gb just remapped the drive letters)

The original XP hard drive is still present and appears to be untouched (aside from being re-lettered.

I would really like the XP pro instance back - is there no way to re-write the boot information?

Is this Acronis OS Selector a viable option to try now? Or only when you are about to install?

Zap, could you point me in the direction of this Fixmbr tool for Vista?

Any advice on getting the XP pro instance back would be much appreciated.

I'm not bothered about the vista profile by the way :)

Thanks
 
Gaijin said:
Thanks guys for your help so far.

Just to summarise:

I had Windows XP Pro installed on my computer on drive C:\ initially. I decided I would like to have Windows Vista to try out but also wished to keep my existing version of Windows XP for compatibility issues .

So when I came to install Windows Vista I chose initially the 64 bit version. (and badly I must add)

I created a new partition in partition magic called I:\ of about 20gb on which to install the Vista installation.

This went without bother.

However on reboot for the first five times or so of rebooting, the computer would not dual boot, it would just boot straight into Vista.

However after the fifth time or so, the startup strangely began to display the dual boot screen albeit with Vista as the default which I soon changed in Vista Advanced settings.

I then found that my shuttle SN26P did not fully support the 64bit version and as such the sound would not work and the WLAN adapter would not work either. Thus i decided to buy 32 bit Vista for the time being until better support came out.

I tried to install over the 64 bit version as suggested by the guys here (I dont blame you that it didnt work by the way!) and whereas it "worked" none of my 32 bit drivers would work and some werent even detected by Vista when installed! It stopped dual booting for good at this point.

So I decided to format the I:\ partition and install Vista 32 bit again onto it in order to get the 32 bit version working at least. I did this and Vista plus sound does indeed work fine.

However, no dual boot with Windows XP.

The I:\ partition is now C:\ (still 20gb just remapped the drive letters)

The original XP hard drive is still present and appears to be untouched (aside from being re-lettered.

I would really like the XP pro instance back - is there no way to re-write the boot information?

Is this Acronis OS Selector a viable option to try now? Or only when you are about to install?

Zap, could you point me in the direction of this Fixmbr tool for Vista?

Any advice on getting the XP pro instance back would be much appreciated.

I'm not bothered about the vista profile by the way :)

Thanks
Click to expand...

i don't think you'll be able to get xp back because when u formated vista partition it deletes the shared boot file that vista made... i use Acronis Disk Director Suite it includes Acronis OS Selector its very good software... u could try it to see if it will boot your xp without formatting xp partition...

http://eu.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/diskdirector/
 
But isn't that shared boot file made up of the boot information stored on my windows drive? Plus the dual boot did stop working before I formatted it.
I'll give the acronis a go when i get back from Ireland. Can't hurt (he says)

In the meanwhile if anyone else has any suggestions on how to rebuild the boot information or can point me in the right direction, I would be very grateful

I'm not scared of a bit of work, just would really like it back!

Thanks for all your help so far though guys ;)
 
its difficult to explain but ill try..

lets say u have xp installed and its running ok then u wanted to install vista x64 along side xp, vista would see xp and it would add itself to the boot file on xp drive and on vista drive also it will remove/change some boot files so that when u boot in to xp u will see the system drive letter is C: and when u boot in to vista u will see the system drive letter is also C: ... but when u installed vista 32 bit over vista x64 it still had the boot files on vista drive so u could get the dual menu back but when u format vista drive it will delete the boot files on vista drive...
 
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Fixed :)

Managed to fix it by using vistabootpro to get the dual boot back (however the xp option did not work at this stage) and then used http://tinyempire.com/notes/ntldrismissing.htm
to fix the boot record, by creating a boot cd.

It then booted into windows and the dual boot was fixed!

Hope this helps others who are as stupid as me.

Many thanks to to all that helped, particularly gareth170, pants and Zap - Cheers! :D
 
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