Hi! My Notebook is an Asus F8Sn and it is pre-installed with Vista. No CD or DVD installer included when I bought it. Only the utilities and Drivers for Vista, and the Asus Recovery DVD are included.
Now I am planning on downgrading my OS to Windows XP. I’ve already downloaded the required drivers from the Asus website.
Here are my questions:
1. Should I format all existing partition in the HDD before installing the win XP?
2. If In case my Windows XP (and driver) installation is unsuccessful or if I encounter some problems, and I would like to go back to Vista OS - Will the Recovery DVD be able to do that? To bring back my Notebook to its original situation as when I bought it?
Thank you in advance and I would greatly appreciate if you can also provide me some instructions on how to this as I have no previous experience in installing OS.
Thanks Phil S.
I think your right about the recovery partition, as I checked in Disk Management there are 4 partitions.
1-VistaOS (C:) 116GB NTFS
2-DATA (D:) 108GB NTFS
3- **No name** 8GB (Primary Partition)
4- NVCACHE 513 MB FAT32 (Primary Partition)
But if ever I install win XP, will I be able to distinguish which one is the “special partition” and which are the partitions that should be used for the XP installation?
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There maybe a special recovery partition on your HDD that the recovery cd references to restore your system to vista.
you should NOT format or delete this partition. If you do, your unlikely to be able to use your recovery CD.
Providing you don’t delete anything like that (you may not even have one) you will be able to recover to the original pre-installed out of the box state with the recovery CD if your XP install doesn’t work how you would like it to.
Unless you are planning on dual booting, you should generally format the existing Vista partition before beginning the XP install. Remember to back up all your personal files, etc!
To Install XP, you insert the CD into your drive, restart the computer and press a key when it gives you the option to boot from the CD drive (you may have a seperate boot options menu/key to access/press to select your boot device on startup. It will let you know on the BIOS screen, otherwise it will just give you a message saying press any key to boot from CD-Rom)
Then Follow the onscreen instructions.
Once its installed, you can go about installing the drivers that you downloaded from the net!
You might also want to look up some Asus forums as generally someone in the community will have provided a step by step guide on how to down grade to XP (its pretty common, though now that computers are getting faster and have more RAM more people are sticking with vista!)
Goodluck