XP UNinstallation question

[Rob Mayercik]

Hey, guys -

I had a spare partition on my hard drive (was planning on putting a linux distro on there to play with), and decided to use it a couple months ago to test-drive XP to see how the machine handled it. It was quite happy being a dual-boot machine with 98SE already on the C: partition.

It seemed to work fine, but I never activated it (didn't have the time to spend reinstalling everything) and the 30-day window closed.

What I'm hoping you folks could help me with is this: how do I uninstall XP? I tried moving NTDETECT and NTLDR into another folder, but all that accomplished was forcing me to find my Ultimate Boot CD to move them back to C:\ so the computer would boot.

I tried booting off the XP CD, but didn't see an uninstall option. I did manage to get into safe mode the other day and at least get my 98SE partition returned to the boot default, though.

I'd just go into FDISK and nuke the XP partition, but after what happened with my last attempt to improvise, I suspect that the results wouldn't be good.

Thoughts?

[Kyocera]

If it were me I'd use some partitioning software that could delete that partition completely, file system and all reformat to fat32 and move that unused space back to your 98 partition and make the 98 partition bootable. Partition Commander will allow you to do all this, but it is not a free software.

[K0LO]

I second Kyocera's recommendation to use partitioning software like Partition Commander, Partition Magic, Acronis Disk Director, Ranish Partition Manager, GParted.

The latter is free software and you can download a LiveCD version from here. Just pop the CD in your drive, boot from it and then delete the unwanted partition. After that you can expand your Win98 partition to encompass all of the free space. GParted is graphical and fairly easy to figure out.

[Rob Mayercik]

If it were me I'd use some partitioning software that could delete that partition completely, file system and all reformat to fat32 and move that unused space back to your 98 partition and make the 98 partition bootable. Partition Commander will allow you to do all this, but it is not a free software.

Make the 98 partition bootable? What does that have to do with my question? I don't have a problem getting into 98 other than I have to go through the XP boot menu to get to it.

The system started out with only Win98 on it. I have a 60GB drive - the 1st 10GB is C:, the next 30GB is D:, and the last 10GB I left unpartitioned so I could try linux on it.

When I got my hands on a copy of XP, I decided to try it on the TP to see how well it ran on something that old. I installed XP to the unpartitioned area, so it's system drive is either E: or F: (can't remember whether it or the optical drive is E:). That made the system dual-boot (with 98 installed first, and XP second). Other than XP putting its boot menu onto the C: so I could select between XP and 98, no changes were made to my C: drive that I am aware of.

I never activated XP, so it has long since passed the 30-day window and is no longer usable (that copy of XP has since been installed and activated on my desktop). I decided that I might as well take XP off so I didn't have to look at the XP boot menu all the time, but my first attempt (relocating NTDETECT and NTLDR) prevented the system from booting. I couldn't find an "uninstall" option in the XP setup program.

I found this on Microsoft's site a moment ago -

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308233/

Is this what I want to do? I didn't upgrade, I went dual-boot.

Rob

[Kyocera]

Well, gee, sorry about my response not fitting totally with your original question.

What I mean by making the partition bootable is that sometimes when you repartion/reorganize a HD the MBR may still be looking for the old boot files, this is not always the case but with me this happend when I dual booted XP/Vista and wanted to get Vista off the drive. Partition commander makes this a simple process by just clicking "make this partition bootable". I guess what I was trying to do was include all the issues I have had doing this procedure in my response, never been a problem before.

[Rob Mayercik]

Sorry, didn't mean for that to come off as a snap.

Are you suggesting that the only way to uninstall XP is to remove the partition and then go tinkering around in the MBR?

[Kyocera]

No, i'm just relaying how I would do it and what has worked for me in the past.

Good partitioning software makes tasks like this easy, it took me a while to learn all the functionalities of partition commander but the CD I have is close to worn out now. It was around $50 a couple of years ago, time for me to upgrade though now with the sata drive laptops I have.

[Rob Mayercik]

No, i'm just relaying how I would do it and what has worked for me in the past.

Good partitioning software makes tasks like this easy, it took me a while to learn all the functionalities of partition commander but the CD I have is close to worn out now. It was around $50 a couple of years ago, time for me to upgrade though now with the sata drive laptops I have.

Ah.

I did a little more hunting around yesterday, and discovered the following on a thread over at annoyances.org:

Check out:

http://www.windowsreinstall.com/install ... /winxp.htm, or search for "osuninst.exe"
from Google. There you'll even find pages at Annoyances.org.

However, I have two OS installed on my computer -- 1 on each of two partitions (as
it should be, as this doesn't mess up each one's Registry, etc.). I just want to
remove XP, which was installed fresh on a separate partition (not on top of another
OS). The easiest was is to simply wipe and reformat the XP partition. However I was
concerned that this would leave the boot-up options (which let you choose which of
the OS to boot) intact and unabl;e to remove them. As it turned out, you can just
delete XP and worry about that later, though, as I describe below.

1. Create a Win98 bootable floppy (format + copy system files)
2. Copy c:\windows\command\attrib.exe and sys.com to the floppy
3. Reboot using the floppy. Type A:\sys c: (if C: is the partition you want to keep
which has Win98 on it, and D: contains XP). This will restore the original booting
option to be Win98-only by restoring the system (i.e. bootup) files.
4. (this step may not be necessary, though it won't hurt, either) You'll get an error
that it couldn't copy command.com. If so, then type "A:\attrib -S -H c:\comamnd.com",
"del c:\command.com" and "copy c:\windows\command.com c:\command.com"
5. Reboot without the floppy. It should go straight to Win98 without the XP options
screen.
6. Delete c:\boot.ini, ntdetect.exe and ntldr. These are hidden files, so you'll
have to make them visible first (View->Options->uncheck not displaying hidden files).
7. Wipe and reformat your d: partition. Goodbye XP!

-----------------

Additional stuff I checked (just details, unnecessary for the removal of XP, but
left for completeness sake):

Hence before deleting the partition (or running the directions from the link referenced
above) I wanted to first make the other OS the default OS in the bootup process.
This is done in WinXP Pro (and probably Home, too) as follows:

- Right-click on "My Computer" and choose "Properties".
- Select the "Advanced" tab.
- Click the "Settings" button under "Startup and Recovery".
- Change the drop-down list to the other OS.
- (optional) change the "Time to display list of OS" to 0-2 seconds

And then I discovered the "To edit the startup options file manually, click Edit"
button, which opens the "boot.ini" which is stored in the root directory of the active
(FDISK) partition. Voila!

I discovered a bunch of other system files there, too, and made a copy of them. This
copy turned out to be important when I hadn't copied "sys.com" to the bootable floppy
and needed to reboot to Win98, but couldn't without these deleted files.

I then tried to follow the link's instructions via MSDOS (for FAT partitions), and
that didn't work. From Safe Mode with Command Prompt it worked, but the program told
me that it couldn't uninstall XP because it didn't have the necessary registration
information. I didn't know what that was (and couldn't find out from the web), but
assumed that it meant that I had to activate my XP installation before I could uninstall
it. Gee. I didn't want to do that because of the annoying activation process, but
did so, anyway, to no effect. Then MS tech support told me how to do it, which are
the 8 steps I wrote at the top.

- osuninst.exe will only work if XP was installed on top of another OS, i.e. not
if it was a clean install on a new partition. They mention that in the KB article
for the Add/remove programs option, but not for the osuninst.exe option.

Between this and what you said above, I think I'm finally good to go. I'll give it a shot tonight.

Thanks.