Removing 64bit Vista and replacing with 32bit

Gaijin · 26 Mar 2007 at 19:44

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

Gaijin · 26 Mar 2007 at 23:43

Is it really as simple as this for Vista? Will this not affect the dual boot?

Gaijin · 4 Apr 2007 at 08:57

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

Gaijin · 4 Apr 2007 at 18:07

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 · 7 Apr 2007 at 11:32

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

Gaijin · 10 Apr 2007 at 21:32

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!