Problem With Fresh XP Install From Win. 2000

I have a machine with Windows 2000 installed on it, and I recently attempted to upgrade to XP with a recovery disc that I have. I got a message saying that 2000 was not upgradeable to XP, and so I attempted a fresh install of XP instead. To make a long story short (and I can disclose these details if someone finds them relevant later), I installed XP onto the only available partition which also happened to have 2000 already on it. Now, setup and installation of XP will not commence (well it will be it will not install a single file), and I cannot access 2000 at all. So basically I have a completely useless machine on my hands and I have no idea what to do. Any thoughts?



Thanks,

John

 

Did you do the fresh install from the recovery disk in question, and was that disk intended to be used with the particular computer in question?

 

A recovery disk does not contain a retail copy of Microsoft Windows. The copy it contains is tailor made for the machine it was supplied with, and therefore has a great chance of not working or installing with any other machine, and goes against the EULA and can therefore be termed illegal.

That said, assuming the recovery disk you are using belongs to the machine you are trying to upgrade, you will have to format your HD first, and as a result lose all your data, if you want to change the Operating System for the machine.

 

If you have nothing valuable on that Windows 2000 partition (like important files, etc.), just take a regular Windows XP bootable install CD, boot it, choose the partition with Windows 2000 as installation destination for XP, and make sure to format this partition before you install XP. There's an option for that during the install procedure. That would make a clean install of Windows XP, if this is what you want.

If you need to rescue some files from the now unbootable Windows 2000, then using a bootable rescue CD is a good option. Search for BartPE on Google, that's a good start. Or, an even easier option is to plug your hard drive into another machine, rescue the files you need, then proceed with clean install of Windows XP.

 

Your recovery disk will not work. It`s specifically linked to the hardware it was released with...

 

Thanks for the responses everyone. Yes, I attempted to install from a recovery CD that was not for the machine that I was trying to install it into. I knew this had the potential to be very bad from the start, but my sister (for who I was trying to install a new OS for) was insistent that I try it anyway. So now it seems that the only way to fix this would be to get an official copy of Windows, or do I know run the risk of that not working either? I don't think there is a way to salvage any old files from 2000 at all.

 

If you format/erase your hard drive, and do a fresh install of Windows XP, I don't see why this won't work.

And, if you can handle plugging your hard drive with screwed-up win2k into another machine, I don't see why you can't salvage some important files from it, if you need to.

Good luck.