G
Guest
Here's how I installed Vista on my eMachines T3092 machine with XP Pro SP2,
AMD Athlon 3000+ 2.17G Processor, 2 GB Ram, 128MB Video on Nvidia Chipset and
160 GB Seagate Hard Drive.
Using Acronis Disk Director I split the hard drive into 2 equal partitions,
making the second partition a logical drive and assigned drive letter D: to
it. I downloaded the Daemon-Tools Virtual Drive program and mounted the Vista
Beta2 ISO image which is stored on a second slave drive in the machine (80GB
Western Digital). I selected the second option in the installer to do a clean
install, not the upgrade, and choose the new D: drive partition. Install was
completed in 30 minutes with only the Audio drivers and Modem drivers not
found. It was easy to tell the Hardware wizard to look in the factory drivers
folder installed on the C: Drive for the audio and modem drivers. In the
Vista 'Advanced System Settings' I selected
Advanced > Start Up and Recovery > Settings and selected 'Earlier Version of
Windows' as the default operating system. When I boot the computer, if I want
to play with Vista I use the down arrow key to select 'Windows' for Vista,
otherwise it boots into XP Pro with no problems at all.
When I got tired of trying out the Vista Beta, I went to the root of Drive
C: and deleted three files put there by the Vista Install, bootmgr, boot.bak
and bootsect.bak. Then using the Management Console in XP Pro, I deleted the
partition D. My normal XP Pro boot screen appears just fine; I did not need
recovery console or the restore CD to continue using XP Pro. No harm was done
to the XP installation. I then used Acronis Disk Director to merge the 2
partitions back into one, and you would never know that Vista Beta 2 was on
the machine.
AMD Athlon 3000+ 2.17G Processor, 2 GB Ram, 128MB Video on Nvidia Chipset and
160 GB Seagate Hard Drive.
Using Acronis Disk Director I split the hard drive into 2 equal partitions,
making the second partition a logical drive and assigned drive letter D: to
it. I downloaded the Daemon-Tools Virtual Drive program and mounted the Vista
Beta2 ISO image which is stored on a second slave drive in the machine (80GB
Western Digital). I selected the second option in the installer to do a clean
install, not the upgrade, and choose the new D: drive partition. Install was
completed in 30 minutes with only the Audio drivers and Modem drivers not
found. It was easy to tell the Hardware wizard to look in the factory drivers
folder installed on the C: Drive for the audio and modem drivers. In the
Vista 'Advanced System Settings' I selected
Advanced > Start Up and Recovery > Settings and selected 'Earlier Version of
Windows' as the default operating system. When I boot the computer, if I want
to play with Vista I use the down arrow key to select 'Windows' for Vista,
otherwise it boots into XP Pro with no problems at all.
When I got tired of trying out the Vista Beta, I went to the root of Drive
C: and deleted three files put there by the Vista Install, bootmgr, boot.bak
and bootsect.bak. Then using the Management Console in XP Pro, I deleted the
partition D. My normal XP Pro boot screen appears just fine; I did not need
recovery console or the restore CD to continue using XP Pro. No harm was done
to the XP installation. I then used Acronis Disk Director to merge the 2
partitions back into one, and you would never know that Vista Beta 2 was on
the machine.
