Agnivo Roy

I have a fairly old PC (about 3 yrs old) having AMD Sempron x86 processor, 512MB DDR333 RAM on a nVidia nForce2 based mainboard. Dunno why but the idea to try out the latest Windows Vista came up today. I freed up a partition, formatted and installed the monster piece of bloatware (yep, it’s vista ultimate edition) on it to check how it runs on my old workhorse which currently runs Windows XP SP2.

Well, Vista ran quite well considering I have an integrated GeForce4 MX graphics controller with 32MB shared RAM…my test was successful. Now it was the time to uninstall. (No, I’m still not convinced to run vista as my primary OS and I sorta hate it)

I thought that there maybe some people like myself who wants to try the same of their old PCs and later wish to uninstall it. But vista puts a new bootloader on your primary active partition and the steps to remove and reinstate the original one are a bit different as follows :

Playing with dual-boot systems has killed many people’s hard drives. I would suggest massive back-ups before you try to remove part of a dual-boot system. If you mess up, you might be unable to boot to any of your partitions. You do this at your own risk!

These are the basic steps you need to do:

1. Backup your data.
2. Reboot and Boot to your Windows XP CD-ROM .
3. Start the Recovery Console. ( press R )
4. Run Fixboot. ( type fixboot )
5. Run fixmbr ( type fixmbr ) to reset the master boot record. ( MBR )
6. Exit the Recovery Console.
7. Reboot your PC.
8. To remove the extra vista entry, edit the boot.ini file if required.
9. Format Your Vista Partition.

So finally, you’ve successfully kicked out the monsterous OS! Happy computing…