Originally Posted by PC eye

For cleaning Vista off entirely the primary partition will have to be reformatted in order to see the new "boot" folder removed. If you don't have a dvd burner for backing up a large volume of files but have a cd writer you can burn the Linux drive tool GParted onto a bootable cd-r.

Why? you first shrink the existing primary by first backing up what you can and then create a second temporary storage partition for backing up the bulk of files onto that from the various folders. Once that is done you can use the format option found on the Vista installation disk to simply reformat the current primary in preparation for XP. Your files are safe and XP then replaces Vista. Both use NTFS 5.0

Once XP is up and running you can then copy your files into the desired folders or keep the second partition for backing things up. Otherwise you can then delete that and expand the first as a single primary. With only one drive installed many prefer a second for storing files.