I recently downgraded my Windows Vista test machine back to Windows XP. Because I know this interests folks, I thought I’d explain How I Did It.
The Vista-to-XP downgrade is not something I did because I loathe Vista. My Vista test machine, Valentine, was flakey. It was flakey because it was an upgrade. In all my books, I recommend against upgrading your PC with a newer version of Windows. In this case, I had to upgrade because I was working on a book (Find Gold in Windows Vista) and needed a machine with Vista. The problems I had with the Vista Beta never went away.
To accomplish the downgrade I cheated. You can cheat as well. Here’s what you need:
- A Windows XP installation disc
- The Windows XP product key
- A spare hard drive
I happen to have a few XP installation discs just lying about. The discs are from my previous attempts to build my own PC. So they’re the real deal; I do not pirate software.
Along with the discs came their product keys, required to complete installation. With Valentine, the product key was also on his case. (Incidentally, I also have an XP product key on a few PC cases out in the boneyard, so product keys aren’t an issue for me; if you do this downgrade, however, you will need a valid XP product key.)
The spare hard drive is the ingenious part, and the key to making this a smooth downgrade. I had a spare SATA drive (150GB) that I pulled from my Macintosh months ago. So I installed that drive into Valentine. It was a simple operation; there was plenty of room and I had a spare SATA cable.
After closing up Valentine’s console, I stuck the Windows XP disc into the optical drive. Turning on the PC greeted me with a Press any key to boot CD prompt. I pressed Enter and the XP Setup program began.
During the XP Setup process, you’re asked to choose a hard drive on which to install the operating system. I choose the newly installed drive, reformatted it (which took forever), and then installed XP on that drive. After installation, the drive booted up and I had XP on my computer.
Additional modification was necessary; I keep all my PC’s original, factory discs. So I was able to re-install and configure the motherboard and video adapter. Further, I downloaded the SP 2 update (my XP installation disc is old) and many, many additional security updates.
Weird thing. The drive I installed showed up as drive F. No problem. But that still means that the computer uses F: as the primary hard drive. C: is the old Vista drive. So when I updated my user folder, I had to copy files from C: to F:. No biggie, but weird — and fixable: Using the Administrative Tools, Computer Management/Disk Management console you can easily re-assign hard drive letters. Still, I think it’s funky to have a drive F as the boot drive, so I might just keep it!
