So you just installed a shiny, new, & legal, copy of Windows Vista. Somewhere along the way, you realized that your XP Partition wasn’t there anymore, and that you’ve lost every single program you’d installed over the past 6 years – gone! All just because you didn’t realize that you were installing Windows Vista to the XP partition.\n<\/p>\n
Don’t worry, NeoSmart is here with the answer yet again. Don’t despair just yet! There’s much in terms of hope, and with this guide, you can get your XP back, with all it’s programs, registry, settings, and more – as if Vista was never there, and no one (*cough* the wife *cough*) needs to know you overwrote your XP – ever!\n<\/p>\n
This guide was born out of a in-depth forum discussion over how to do just this<\/a>, but with a lot of detours and road constructions along the way. This guide can be used to recover XP only in one case: While doing a clean<\/em> install of Vista, you accidentally selected the wrong partition to install to, and as such, you wrote Vista to the same drive as XP. It won’t recover an upgrade from XP to Vista, nor will it help you “unformat” your partition if that’s what you did.\n<\/p>\n —————————————\n<\/p>\n —————————————\n<\/p>\n These steps will stop you from booting into any other Vista installs you might have had – if you want to still boot Vista you’ll have to not<\/em> rename the folder \\Boot\\ and not<\/em> carry out the bootsect-related steps. Then after all that is done, you have to install and use VistaBootPRO to add XP to the Vista boot menu. Remember, more help can be had on the forums<\/a>, and please, the blog is not support central, don’t abuse it by asking for help here! Good Luck!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So you just installed a shiny, new, & legal, copy of Windows Vista. Somewhere along the way, you realized that your XP Partition wasn’t there anymore, and that you’ve lost every single program you’d installed over the past 6 years … Continue reading \n
1. \\ntldr
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2. \\NTDETECT.COM
\n
3. \\MSDOS.SYS
\n
4. \\CONFIG.SYS
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5. \\AUTOEXEC.BAT
\n
6. \\boot.ini (if available)<\/code> <\/li>\n
\n C:
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cd \\
\n
bootsect.exe \/nt52 all \/force
\n
exit<\/code> <\/li>\n
\n c:
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cd \\
\n
ren boot boot.vista
\n
ren Windows Windows.vista
\n
ren Users Users.vista
\n
ren \"Program Files\" \"Program Files.vista\"
\n
ren \"Config.Msi\" \"Config.Msi.vista\"
\n
ren \"Documents and Settings\" \"Documents and Settings.vista\"
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ren MSOCache MSOCache.vista
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ren ProgramData ProgramData.vista
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ren Recycled Recycled.vista
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ren * *.vista
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xcopy Windows.old\\* c:\\ \/E \/C \/I \/G \/H \/R \/K \/Y
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ren Windows.old Windows.old.vista
\n
exit <\/code><\/li>\n