Rolling back to XP

Rather stupidly I installed Windows 7 RC after a bottle of wine last night and never read any of the literature, so never created a partition or anything.

So now I have Win7 as my main OS, problem is it doesn't seem to like most of my hardware (mainly my netgear WG111v3 dongle) and I'd like to go back to WinXP 64 SP2 - however when I pop in the disc and boot up from it, I try and format the HDD and get the following:

Setup was unable to format the partition. The disk may be damaged.

Make sure the drive is switched on and properly connected to your computer.

You must select a different partition for Windows.

Now I know the HDD is fine, it isn't even two weeks old and it works perfectly well under Win7 and it worked well under 64xp. So how on earth do I format this partition and get back on XP64?

Thanks and apologies if this has been asked before, I am just really frustrated and annoyed at myself.

TK

Really, it's that simple? If so sorry for wasting your time and thank you for making me look like a fool

Problem though is it will only boot up from the CD in windows?

Edit: No, I didn't have to install any HDD drivers. I stuck in the HDD and popped in my CD and installed it straight away, everything worked fine.


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update
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Yeah I just popped in the Win7 disc again and it totally ignores it, takes me through to Winodws and if I run it through windows it does not give me an option to remove any partitions. Obviously disk manager won't work as the partition I want to format is the one that Win7 sits on.



Going to download Gparted and see if I can nuke it that way.

Gparted just tells me that I have an invalid partition table on my USB drive, *****

Hi, so do you have a "Windows Old" folder.? when you select My Computer, and then the drive that is running at the moment,?

also what does it say in MSCONFIG under the boot section?

Windows 7 (H:\Windows) Current OS; Default OS

There is no Windows.old anywhere on my computer, but there is a Windows folder within my Windows folder that looks like my old XP...

srq2625 said:

Time for a stupid question (I'm pretty good at those) ... In your BIOS, have you selected your DVD drive to be first in boot order?

Next stupid question ... Are you sure your DVD is bootable? As in, are you sure it's the one you used to install Win7 ?

Yep to the first question and I am pretty sure the Win7 DVD is bootable, I just downloaded it off the MS website and burned it. I am never doing anything drunk again!

What about msconfig/boot.
Here is mine, what does it say in your one.