Delete Vista with gparted and install xp

Hello Olga,

I suggest, that you give us an overview of the present state of your harddisk, BEFORE you change or delete anything. I will show you how below. Concerning the recovery partition, it's a good idea to backup it to a second storage medium (might be also a CDROM or DVD). The problem is, to get it to work again. Most often, it gets started by pressing some keys at boot (e.g. [ALT] [F10]), i.e. the Master Boot Record contains the startup code and has to be backuped, too. This is a rather simple task with "GParted". However, it might also be possible to leave the recovery partition untouched on your harddisk.-

If there is a faint intent to revert to Vista again, try to get a Vista DVD and the hardware drivers disk by your dealer as a supplemental reassurance. To install Vista secondary to XP is not very difficult.

BTW, are you sure you have all necessary hardware drivers for XP ? Have a look upon the download pages of your hardware supplier.

Of course you can also do "tabula rasa" with an XP-CDROM. No need to use "GParted", you can do all new partitioning/formatting with XP. It doesn't matter, what file-/operation system was precedent ... but you loose all old data and the recovery partition.

To get the current partitioning state of your harddisk, burn a "GParted Live" -ISO-image to a CDROM and boot it. You see a graphical image of the partitioning scheme. On the Linux Desktop, there is a Terminal icon, double-click on it and a console window with prompt opens.
Type at the prompt (l is a lower case L):

hit [ENTER] , write down the print-out and present it here.

Regards
cmdr

PS: XP drivers are no problem !

English : http://www.service.targa.co.uk/dokument … k_1526.zip
German: http://www.service.targa.de/dokumente/X … k_1526.zip

No need to backup the recovery partition, if you have the "Easy-Install DVD", contained in the factory package !

Hello Olga,

Result of "fdisk" : sda2 is the recovery partition (13.2 GiB) at then end of the HDD. File ID 27 is usually used by many manufacturers for that purpose. AFAIK, it's a simple FAT32 partition. If you don't alter MBR (nearly impossible, because XP writes its own) or store the boot code (not the partition table) with "MC_HxEd" and recover it afterwards, you could keep the functionality of the recovery partition (start at boot with F9 with your "Targa" laptop).

I came across it a short time, before you opened this thread.

Yes, XP-CDROM has all required programs to create a bootable partition even on a brand-new harddisk. Otherwise it's achild's play with "GParted" to set the bootflag.

MC_HxEd (right-click on the desktop "Fluxbox" opens - "File/System utils" - "MC_HxEd") is intended to get detailed informations about the partitioning or to backup Master Boot Record (MBR) / Partition (Volume) Boot Records before or while you are doing changes with "Gparted". It's just a composition of features, that Linux offers with its console mode. The User interface "XDialog" gives an appropriate way ("treeview") to handle it. Just click on the + sign to open the branches. You see the partitioning structure of your harddisk(s), are able to edit arbitrary sectors (Caution! Damage possible!) or restore them, change the bootflag or the file system / volume ID. Click on everything you want, to see what it does. Former state is always backuped with an attached USB-Stick. If you install "GParted" on an USB Stick and use the "toram=filesystem.squashfs" option to get it free for mounting, you have your "Leatherman" or "Swiss Pocket Knife" for Harddisk desasters always at your fingertips. The version included in "GParted" was the first. I recently added a function to store all Boot Records of all storage devices seen by "Gparted" in one step. You can download this new version here(look for the newest dated version). Copy it to a usb stick, mount it  and put "MC_HxEd" to "/usr/bin", overwriting the old version. Thus you can start it with "Fluxbox" as usual.

Regards
cmdr