Why would this happen?

finsfree

finsfree

Member
I have three sata hard drives. My OS (Vista Business) is on one of the drives C:. I tried to load Windows XP Pro on the same drive C: and do a clean install.

The Windows XP Pro disk did not detect any of the drives. I had to take the drive (the one I wanted to load XP on) out and connect it via USB to another PC and reformate it to NTFS.

After that, I was able to load XP Pro.

Why is that???:confused:

Is there some kind of safety fetcher with Vista that does not let you to delete system files???:confused:
 
AFAIK you can't downgrade windows (it's a "feature" of the installer) i.e. if you're installing older on newer (like when going from Vista to XP), it will refuse to install... that's all I can come up with.
 
yes, unless you reformat your hdd, you would not be able to install xp to replace vista. not sure about multiple partitions though.
 
The best approach is to delete the partitions and start over completely. I use the old DOS fdisk.com to do this but I'm sure there are more modern ways to do it, although certainly not any faster ways. Once the drive has no partitions, any O/S will load normally.
 
I know you can't downgrade but, I was booting to the XP CD. It's not like I had Vista running and then inserted Windows XP CD into the drive and then said, "Install".

I got it to work after I reformated it but, what a pain.

I only had this problem with Vista.
 
finsfree said:
I know you can't downgrade but, I was booting to the XP CD. It's not like I had Vista running and then inserted Windows XP CD into the drive and then said, "Install".

I got it to work after I reformated it but, what a pain.

I only had this problem with Vista.
Click to expand...

doesn't matter. the windows xp installer detects a newer version of windows and refuses to install. really "pain in the ass feature" of windows... fastest work around is to get a partition manager on a boot disk and remove the partition and recreate it.
 
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