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    Windows Vista Business w/ XP Pro "downgrade"

    Discussion in 'Windows OS and Software' started by allfiredup, May 30, 2009.

  1. allfiredup

    allfiredup Notebook Virtuoso

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    Situation- A new laptop is ordered with Windows Vista Business w/ XP Professional 'downgrade'. The laptop ships with XP Pro pre-installed and no recovery discs or way to restore XP in case of hard drive failure or similar catastrophic event. The only media included is a Vista Business 'upgrade' disc.

    Is there any way to create an XP recovery disc? If not, cloning the hard drive would create a backup drive bootable with XP installed, correct?
     
    allfiredup, May 30, 2009
    #1
  2. CooLMinE

    CooLMinE Notebook Deity

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    Acronis True Image does a good job in cases like this one.
    Just install it, make a backup of your whole disk and make a bootable disk.

    If anything goes wrong in the future just insert the bootable cd, restore the image (takes a few minutes) and you are good to go :)
     
    CooLMinE, May 30, 2009
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  3. Mastershroom

    Mastershroom wat

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    Is this a Dell machine by any chance? If you get the XP downgrade option, it should ship with an XP recovery disk. My mother just bought a Latitude E6400 with the downgrade option, and my aunt bought some model of OptiPlex desktop with the same XP downgrade option...both of their systems had the XP recovery disk in the box along with the Vista one.

    If I were you, I would contact Dell and just ask them to send you the XP disk, since you never recieved one with the system.
     
    Mastershroom, May 30, 2009
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  4. swarmer

    swarmer beep beep

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    Just upgrade to Vista. ;) It's nice and fast with SP2. Except when booting... but you don't have to boot much... I usually hibernate instead.

    Anyway, see if they put a recovery partition on your drive... or installed a utility to burn a recovery disk. If not, then try a disk cloning program. You can burn a gparted livecd and clone the disk with that (I think) and recover with the same livecd.
     
    swarmer, May 30, 2009
    #4
  5. Shyster1

    Shyster1 Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    What is the make/model of the notebook? My guess is that the OEM provides some way to create a set of recovery discs using the hidden restore partition.
     
    Shyster1, May 30, 2009
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  6. HTWingNut

    HTWingNut Potato

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    Either way, you paid for the license, you are owed the CD/DVD.
     
    HTWingNut, May 30, 2009
    #6
  7. Shyster1

    Shyster1 Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    Sez who? All depends on the terms of the license, don't it?
     
    Shyster1, May 30, 2009
    #7