Question about the windows.old file

[Prose]

I installed Vista RC1 last night without incident and everything works fine.
My question has to do with the 'windows.old' file that is created during
installation. I understand that it contains my Windows XP and everything
that was previously on my computer, correct? Do I reinstall the programs I
was already running such as Microsoft Office, Mirc, etc or is there a way to
use them from that windows.old file?

Thanks!
Mary

 

[Mark D. VandenBerg]

Any program that is not already installed in Vista (hint: look at you Start
Menu to see what is installed) needs to be reinstalled. Once you are sure
you have all of the documents and files out of the windows.old file, you may
delete it if you wish, for disk space.

 

[Prose]

Thanks, Mark. If I decide to go back to Windows XP for some reason, I would
need to leave this directory intact, right?

 

[Mark D. VandenBerg]

If you want to go back to XP, you have to reinstall XP. I am 99% sure there
is not a way to use the files from the windows.old folder to do this.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

My understanding is that the files in windows.old are sufficient to get a
working XP back up, but it is an entirely manual process and the success
rate even among experienced techies is very low.

 

[Mark D. VandenBerg]

My understanding is that the files in windows.old are sufficient to get a
working XP back up, but it is an entirely manual process and the success
rate even among experienced techies is very low.

Hence the "99%." I, also, have heard rumours of such things as free
laptops, guaranteed contracts, white elephants and restoring XP from the
".old" folder. But I have never seen one.

 

[Jon Davis]

I disagree with what was said about restoring XP entailing reinstalling from
scratch or that it is difficult or near impossible. I did a rollback to XP
in a matter of about an hour, but I was "lucky".

Basically, there are two actions (that I can think of) to rollback to XP:

1) restoring your original files and directories -- basically you need to
move everything in the windows.old directory, and to do this you will need
an XP-based or NTFS-capable boot disk (see http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/)
that properly supports deleting or moving/renaming the Vista directories, or
else have XP or some other recent gold release Windows operating system
loaded on another partition

1b) I had a second partition with XP 64-bit so to rollback Vista to my
XP 32-bit environment I just fired up XP 64-bit, took ownership of all of
the Vista-installed directories (because the Documents and Settings
directory was locked down), and moved them all to a new "Windows.Vista"
directory (or similarly named), and then moved all the directories in
Windows.old back to the root directory, which might have also required
taking ownership to do so.

2) restoring your boot sector and your boot config to be XP-based. But I
believe this is optional; Vista retains the XP bootloader, but adds in its
own that loads first. There are several ways of going about restoring the XP
one. AFAIK, Vista itself has a program that can rollback the bootloader to
point to XP called Bootsec.exe.
http://pointerx.net/blogs/glozano/a...er-after-dual-booting-with-Windows-Vista.aspx
But I think the XP boot disk should have command line tools that should
change the MBR and revert the boot sector to be XP-based, but if it's not
enough then you can also half-install XP (booting from the XP install disk)
to a temporary Windows directory that you can delete as soon as the first
reboot occurs. Then just choose your old (original) XP installation when the
Windows selection comes up, and when XP loads, update the boot.ini file
(which is read only, you will need to change its properties)

2b) I got lucky; I was dual booting to Vista from another hard drive so
I just reverted my boot drive to the original drive from the BIOS. The drive
on which the Vista loader was installed is still installed with the Vista
loader, but I'm not using it, and I will wipe it clean in the next RC.

Jon