Uninstall XP

[matsprt]

I just bought a nice Sony Vaio. It came preloaded with XP Home. I do NOT like or want XP. I have W2000 Professional that I would like to install but am finding that removing XP is a job. Can someone lead me through this ?

My hard drive is partitioned-one partition shows FAT 32 and the other NTFS. I can't find any uninstall programs, I can't seem to change the boot sequence, I can't get to dos commands to Fdisk the whole dang thing. I'm sure there is a way, but how??

 

[linney]

Get hold of an old 9x startup floppy and use that to get to DOS and then run your Fdisk. If you can't get a startup disk, download one from here

http://www.bootdisk.com

 

[matsprt]

That would be nice if this Laptop had a floppy. It has only a CDRW/DVD. You have to add/buy an external floppy if you want one. Once I'm through this issue I don't see myself as needing a floppy much......

 

[linney]

Did you get any form of recovery disk or installation cd with your Sony. If you have a recovery cd or installation cd can you use this to do the format part and then stop it before setup and install 2000. If you dont have any cd only a recovery partition on the hard drive maybe this has the option to format.

Do you have the Recovery Console option available to you? If so you could look at the Diskpart tool.

Finally if you have access to a machine with a floppy drive and CD writing software you could create a bootable CD startup disk (Windows 9x boot files) and use that in your machine to Fdisk and Format.

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~rossstew/drs/bootcd.html

 

[GoldenEternity]

The Win2k installation will allow you to delete/format partitions. Just start it up, when it asks you what partition to install 2k on, it will give you the option to delete the partition... something like D > enter > L...

Then, once you have some unformatted space on your disk, you can format it as NTFS or 98 from within the installer.