[wannabe1]

That's the recovery set which will format and reinstall Windows. It'll work, but you'll lose all your data. Good last resort, though. Write your product key on disk 1 with a permanent marker and hang on to them!

What's happened is Vista has been installed as an upgrade to the XP (hence the name change to the original Windows folder). Unfortunately, this build has no working uninstaller so you can't "roll back" to the previous system. In addition, it has written it's own boot instructions to the boot sector (bootloader) which won't work with XP...we need to fix that first.

I'm thinking we can get the old operating system going again using Recovery Console to repair the boot sector (get rid of the bootloader), rename the original Windows folder, rename the Vista folder, and edit the boot.ini file to match the changes. Sounds fun, doesn't it? Then the Vista folder can simply be deleted.

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whoa, looks tough to do

i think im gonna have to take the easy way out and use the recovery disk but im thinking about using recovery console.

To be sure,
what happens after i simply delete the Vista folder? Will it go back to normal

[Pat2]

whoa, looks tough to do

i think im gonna have to take the easy way out and use the recovery disk but im thinking about using recovery console.

To be sure,
what happens after i simply delete the Vista folder? Will it go back to normal

[wannabe1]

You'll delete the Vista folder from XP...if all goes well.

If you haven't got data on the machine that you need, the recovery would be the way to go. If you have files you want to keep, let's try the repair. We may be able to save a couple steps in recovery console by renaming the original Windows file from Vista.