#Downgrading from windows 7 to xp drivers#
#Downgrading from windows 7 to xp upgrade#
#Downgrading from windows 7 to xp iso#

When you get on the drive's menu, select the drive the corresponds to the 20GB partition that we created earlier (tipically it will be labeled as Drive C:, if you formatted it as NTFS when we were under gParted, select that, but dont touch the original larger partition)Д¦) After XP is installed, go and 'bless' your DriverPacks DVD, along with any other Drivers you may have found online that might work for you and go and try them. Simple as that, in case if you have to return back.ДҐ) Start the XP installation procedure as normal. The Restart sequence for gParted will start, wait for it to eject the CD for you, once done that, insert your Windows XP CD onto your drive, then press enter to resume system restart.ДЄt this point, your original Windows 7 installation wont be available because you have change the partition flags boot parameter from the primary partition to the secondary one that we just created here, to make that installation bootable again, just repeat my same procedure again, this time setting the primary partition as boot. Immediately, your Newly created 20GB partition will be seen as the boot partition under your system bios, you are good to go at this stage.Д¤) Close gParted, doubleclick on the red (shutdown) icon on the top of the gParted desktop, then doubleclick on restart. Under Manage Flags select Boot and close that window. I recommend NTFS (if offers security parameters and functions otherwire not found under FAT32).ДЈ) After creating and FORMATTING (TO NTFS) a new partition, right click on your newly created 20GB NTFS partition, a menu will come up, on the menu click on Manage Flags. Make sure that you do not elect the default one which is 'Ext2', that is for Linux, and you will not be installing Linux, but Windows XP and XP requires either FAT(Max 2GB, cant use that)/FAT32(MS says max is 32GB, but can go much higher than this, but dont use that anyways as its an OLDER standard and NTFS offers more features other FAT32) or NTFS. You will have 20GB of unallocated space that you get to use to create a new partition there.Дў) Right click on the 20GB unallocated space and choose to create a new NTFS partition. Once you get to boot your computer, simply do the following to test out Windows XP WITHOUT Risking loosing your existing Windows 7 installatio in case if you have to go back for any reason (missing XP drivers?, etc?)ДЎ) Resize the primary (main) partition (the largest one you will find, NOT the restore one (if any)) taking away, like 20 GB.

#Downgrading from windows 7 to xp iso#

Instead of FORMATTING, download gParted (Genome Partitioning Tool), its a freeware ISO image that you get to burn to a blank CD-R, then boot your computer. Also video, sound, WiFi, Ethernet drivers could be drivers that you may not be able to find at this time (try getting the driverpacks and I wish you good luck with that!) I can boot straight to the XP guest but I'm trying to find a way to automatically shutdown the host after the user shuts down XP.No, dont wipe the Hard Disk Drive first, because you dont know if you are going to be able to fully get XP to work, or if you will be able to get the SATA drivers for your XP disc to slip stream it (nLite) with the correct SATA drivers. Now I just need to make it foolproof for the user so it's completely transparent from boot to shutdown. I've given the guest 1.75GB of ram leaving 256MB for the host. Experimenting, I've been able to accompish this on a comp with 2GB of ram. I could just setup Linux on the comp and copy over the virtual hard drive with the users XP setup in it and they're good to go with no time wasted reinstalling all the apps they use.

This would allow us to buy comps without the cost of an OS and new apps. What I've been looking into is using VirtualBox on a minimal Linux host that boots straight into an XP guest. The bad thing is at first when they started offering this, it was free, now they charge $99 for the option, but it's still worth it for us. Dell's option to downgrade to XP on new computers is a great idea and I order all our new comps with this option.

#Downgrading from windows 7 to xp upgrade#

To upgrade all these programs just so they will work with Win 7 does not make sense economically since they work great in XP. I'm the net admin at my work and many of the programs we use (virus protection, accounting, CAD) are not compatible with Win 7.