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Vista compatability with XP

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9 replies

by jgodi

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A friend asked me to find an answer, so before I scour the web I thought I'd ask the smartest people I know.

He has a laptop with Vista installed. Two Vista created partitions (NTFS) on the hard drive (C: and D:)
C: has the OS on it. D: houses his personal data

He wants to install XP on C partition (going back to XP, not as a dual boot), but wants to be sure XP will read his data on the Vista created partition D.

Will this work?? Any thoughts??

9 replies

by ic-it

will be finding drivers for the laptop. Go to the manufacturers site and see if drivers are available for that model.
You can also use a tool (such as Belarc Advisor) to identify the hardware. XP should have no problem reading the D: drive.
If he is not re-assured pull the hard drive and use an adapter to slave it to an XP system to show him.

by jplconsultant

I've heard (but have not seen with my own eyes) that Dell is selling laptops with Vista and they are intentionally [b]not[/b] providing XP drivers. I don't know if others are doing this as well. So check for drivers first!

JPL()

by maniacman

This is what sucks bigtime when you buy a laptop with a preinstalled OEM copy of Windows. You're locked into what they give you pretty much.

by edcrabb

Hi,

I am a Dell Factory Certified Repair Tech for both laptops and desktop systems. Dell provides drivers for XP on all the equipment. Finding them for the particular model can be a bit of a challange sometimes. I have a Tech login so I have access to all the drivers, and information on all systems, but the average Joe can get the drivers from the non-comercial web site as well.

by code_addict_63

As long as you install XP, using NTFS.
You can read the files.
As far as the install, you'll need XP sp2 for the drivers needed to drive the newer hardware, XP, without sp2 will cause a pagefault error

by jgodi

Thanks for all the responses. He did install SP2, and as for the drivers, we were able to download all of them from the Dell site, no problems.

by maniacman

Please understand that when you buy a PC or laptop with a preinstalled OS, it is expected that you will not remove this OS and install another in place of it. Doing so effectively voids your OEM warranty and if you call their support line for help, they'll hang up on your as soon as they realize that you now have a "non-supported" configuration by their standards. If you're fine with this then yes, you can install XP on the C: drive, but before you simply jump in and do so, you'll need to ensure you have all of the device drivers you'll need for the components, such as video, audio, network, etc. Also, since the second partition is formatted as NTFS, I see no reason why XP won't be able to see it. You may have to go to disk management and import is a a foreign disk, since Vista wrote its own disk signature on the it, but it should be a piece of cake. Again, realize that by doing what you're proposing will void the OEM warranty, so think it over carefully.

by edcrabb

Only if you destroy the machine. Every Dell comes with a factory repair CD or DVD in the case of Vista. If the system starts to get wiggy, you can always re-image the drive back to the factory Vista installation. Of course you loose what ever is on the partitions unless you burn it to DVD or CD, or a network drive. But if the machine is bad enough, you can recover to factory specs. If the machine is still acting up, then you call Dell. You don?t tell them you had XP on it. A word to the wise, if you ever do end up having to re-image a disc to factory or any other image. Dell stores a hidden partition on the disc with recovery information. If you use a utility like PARTIMAGE (PING) to delete the partitions, you may have issues getting a factory image back on the machine.

Where I work, I constantly have to reimage Dell systems because we have so many of them deployed and users will be users, and systems end up with nasty viruses, or corrupted MBR's, whatever the case, but the Image I restore was made from a factory installation and always puts the utility partition back on the system.

You may want to consider using PING or because it is Freeware, and works very well. But if you ever start a project like changing operating systems, it is very wise to make an image of the drive before you start. This way if things go wrong, you can restore the drive back to its original configuration.

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