Re: Re-formatting from Vista to XP

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

Harry Binswanger wrote:
> So, do any of you know how feasible and easy it would be to buy a laptop
> that has Vista installed, re-format the drive and install XP from discs?
Good question. Because they're selling laptops (and desktops) with
Vista preinstalled that are NO WAY up to the real Vista specs. Now I
did read one horror story a while back, which I posted in part on
March 6: somebody bought a Dell, and

 >>ordered Windows XP Professional. The IT man explained that
 >>Dell did not give him any choice in this matter, because it was not
 >>an option. We tried every trick we have come to know, including
 >>using DOS to reformat the hard drive and install XP on it. Perhaps
 >>the BIOS is set up only for Vista, because it would not accept
 >>Windows XP as an OS. So we tried to do a dual boot install using a
 >>partitioning application, but after going through the setup, Vista
 >>would not allow this.
Whether this is inherent to Vista or some mumbo-jumbo of Dell's I
don't know.
One thing that does occur to me is that you cannot reformat (by which
I assume he means repartition and format) modern humongous hard drives
with DOS's fdisk. It chokes. Western Digital and Maxtor supply
utilities (with the disk or on their Web sites) for doing this though.

--
Patricia M. Godfrey
PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx