Cannot reinstall Vista

Hi all, im new to this forum, and i have a huge problem (at least i think)
i have an acer aspire 3680 notebook that came with vista home edition. i copied an back up disc of the computer, and went and installed window xp pro over it.(formatted first)
I decided to go back to vista (too much of a hassle digging around for drivers to make xp work) so i used my recovery cd i made and it just copies it to acer(D
and xp is on Local Disk(C and the computer always starts up in xp. How can i get rid of xp and get my vista back on???

Thanks

 

Don't think you can. It's more than likely the recovery cd is just that, a recovery cd to recover you system when you already have vista installed.

You would need an installation CD to re-install vista afaik.

 

Ok actually i was thinking that was the case, thanks so much for replying.

 

You need to boot from the reinstall CD/DVD. Reboot your computer and at the Acer screen, press F12 and select "Boot from CD/DVD".

If F12 doesn't work, push different "F" buttons until you reach a "Select boot location" screen.

EDIT: does your computer have a recovery partition? You could restore your computer to factory settings (with Vista and whatnot) by booting from the recovery partition.

 

Hi, i have booted from the dvd drive with my acer back up disk. It automatically copies the disc to \Harddisk0\Partition2.
As for the recovery partition, it doesn't have one. i'm thinking i may have to buy recovery disks for this. The acer back up disk just doesn't restore it.
BTW, im not very computer smart either he he he

 

Maybe if you post in the Acer forum you could get more concrete answers than here. I'm not familiar with Acer's backup/restore disks.

 

It didn't format correctly. Wipe the disk completely, getting rid of all partitions and re-do the recovery process. You can use Gparted to do that.

 

^^I am, I have an Acer Aspire 9302. If the recovery system is the same it needs vista to be installed, and the op has installed XP over vista.

The recovery disk only backups vista, so if you change OS's to XP the disk doesn't work because there is no vista OS to recover.

 

I've never heard of Gparted. Do i just put this Gparted on a disc, and then boot from it?

 

using gparted is a lame suggestion. it's extra work. you can format/partition your HD during the Vista install with the Vista Disc. there is absolutely no need to mess with gparted

 

I've got it to work now, not sure how i did it, but i got to delete this partition2 that was showing up, and finally got a clean install of Vista. Think i'll leave things the way they are.

 

Extra work? He tried what you said and the OS was installed only to one partition b/c it was overwriting XP. It is the cause of the problem

 

It's because he was doing it wrong. For a person that's not very computer savvy, gparted may be extra work. For a more advanced user like you, it's a powerful tool.