real mess on emachne, advice sought

[jokerwild65]

Vista is beautiful program however it forbids removal and me being
the original "why, who,how person" who wants to take apart
everything and understand how it works. I soon found out it is the
land of no return and I decided it could np get any worse so we
decided to either buy a new copy of XP or possibly installing my
original software over the 2000.

Can I do this? Thinking I can't without formatting my hard drive
however I would then need to reload all the programs and everything?

Any advice?

 

[DL]

Unless you have a dual boot o/s your only option us to clean install
whichever o/s you decide.
You will lose everything on C, assuming that is where the o/s resides, and
will have to reinstall your apps

 

[Kevin]

Vista is beautiful program however it forbids removal and me being
the original "why, who,how person" who wants to take apart
everything and understand how it works. I soon found out it is the
land of no return and I decided it could np get any worse so we
decided to either buy a new copy of XP or possibly installing my
original software over the 2000.

Can I do this? Thinking I can't without formatting my hard drive
however I would then need to reload all the programs and everything?

Any advice?

What do you mean by "forbids removal"? Didn't your Emachines system come
with a Windows disk? Just reinstall that. If you do an install of the
operating system only then your data (theoretically) would not be affected.
I would do a clean install. This would mean a format of the hard drive and
would wipe the drive. Back up your data.

 

[jokerwild65]

We did a clean install where the drive was formatted? and got stuck
on the regitration screen. We negoiated a look at C and found all of
the xp files still there. We next did a DOD wipe, and once again the
original software kept hanging so we figured we would buy a new copy
of XP and do a clean install of a new program however We have a
the Windows 2000 professional and decided that if we could install
that and make it work that we could then install xp over it but we
are not sure on this and I am thinking we need to wipe the drive
completely and then install. There is something saved ?Command
Com> which seems to cause problems.

I guess I will install the original XP when I get sorted out from all
the junk I had saved before I screwed everything up.