thechensta Posted October 12, 2008 Report Share Posted October 12, 2008 Ok, so I have a custom built PC and I have both a xp x64 professional and vista x64 home premium disk (due to 8 GB of ram) and have installed home premium first... I want to downgrade to xp due to a few problems i can't get past in vista, but everytime i install, I get a disk read error and it tells me to hit ctrl+alt+del to restart... I have already tried:~reformatting the entire partition and making a clean install of xp (THANK GOD I BACKED MY FILES UP)~installing xp onto vista by going into the xp recovery console, typing fixboot, fixmbr, ren windows winvista, and then installing xp (ran into a snag cuz I couldn't figure out the password to access the drive when vista was installed) -I've tried enabling the admin accnt by going into cmd and typing "net user administrator \active:yes" and then setting a password, but the password i set worked to log on, but not in recovery console login~using my xp 32-bit home edition disk (same results)I'm pretty sure it's a corrupt master boot record, but without a proper password, I can't get it to work right... any ideas how to get through this? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thechensta Posted October 12, 2008 Author Report Share Posted October 12, 2008 Does anyone know of a way to get past this? I really have some limitations when using vista as some of the things that normally work in xp don't work in vista and plus vista eats too many resources... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
-pops- Posted October 13, 2008 Report Share Posted October 13, 2008 Provided you have a full XP disk the easiest way to install is to either:1) Replace the hard drive with a new one (that doesn't have any operating system on it) and install on that.or2) Put the drive into another computer and carry out a low level format to remove all traces of previous data then install your new system. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thechensta Posted October 13, 2008 Author Report Share Posted October 13, 2008 Actually, I found out what the problem was... turned out that my second hard drive was somehow preventing the xp installation from continuing, so i just unplugged it until xp was all set up Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts