Help with Recovering Windows XP

That doesn't work either. How would I be able to revert back to XP with those still there, don't I need to rename the current Program Files and Windows to have .vista at the end?
 
no, to anything other than their original names.

The only thing that matters is that only the contents of windows.old are moved to C:\ with their original names intact.
 
I don't know - I wasn't there when you did it.

Don't focus so much on folowing the steps by the letter as on obtaining the same end result that I've described in this therad. Besides that, I really can't help you.

Just focus on getting the contents of Windows.old back into C:\, and use the bootsect command - that's al there is to it.
 
I started to follow the guide and restore vista, but I ran into a possible problem during the bootsect.exe section and wanted you to verify that I did this part right. Here's what I entered: bootsect.exe /nt52 all /force. This is the message I got in response for the c: drive: Updated NTFS filesystem bootcode. The update may be unreliable since the volume could not be dismounted during the update: Access is denied. WIll this cause problems or am I fine to continue with the recovery?
 
I had the same problem I had the first time, with this error message: "Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt <Windows root>\System32\hal.dll ". Is there anything I can do to fix this, or am I stuck with vista?
 
Stick your Windows XP cd in the drive at this point and perform a repair install (not a re-install, but a repair install). IT's possible that you've done everything right and it's just a hardware issue stopping it from booting.
 
I'm looking for my XP install disk now, but I'm not sure if I'll find it since XP came installed on the computer. Right now my main problem is that I can't delete or do anything really with all the Program Files and WIndows folders that I renamed while going through this whole thing. So right now I have 2 Program Files, one of which doesn't have a different extension on the end, 2 Windows folders, an extra Users folder, and I can't delete any of them. I've already tried deleting them from the command prompt, both within vista and from the boot CD. Please let me know if you know of a way to delete those folders, thanks.
 
Once you're in XP, you should be able to delete them without a problem. Or from a Linux Live CD if you can't wait.
 
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