GameBanshee Forums

Question. I installed XP on my computer (Dell manufactured). I want to go back to the original OS I was using when I purchased the computer, Windows ME. If I were to forat my drive, would it revert back to the original OS? If not, then can someone tell me how to go about changing OS's back to ME.

I always reccomend doing an FDisk rather than just a format, i have noticed that format sometimes doesn't clear things out.

As for reverting, i am not sure it is possible, if you were to format it would take all your programs and games off.

I don't have any experience with streaming XP off a machine as for getting ME back on, just go to bios set the primary boot as your CD-Rom drive, then follow the setup. Well maybe, i haven't installed ME, but i assume it is the same as 98

You might want to create a start up disk with your OS before you do this just in case

You can try a couple of different things.

First, you can put your Windows ME disk in the drive, click on Setup and see if it will re-install ME over XP. I've always found this to be a bad way to go because upgrade OS or installing one over another tends to leave bits and pieces of the old OS around, which in turn leads to compatibility problems and other bugs.

What I would do is back up everything you want to keep either with a CD burner or on to a Zip disk, and fdisk your hard drive from a boot disk, then reformat it, and reinstall Windows ME.

When you run fdisk or when you reformat your hard drive, it is going to wipe out everything on it, so make sure you back up the important things.

Ok, thats what I was afraid of... Thanks anyway.

WindowsXP might have an uninstall feature, depending on how you installed it.

I'm not sure how to go about it (I installed XP on a clean partition), but I know I've heard of there being a way.

You could delete the windows directory and re-install, you would probably lose half your files anyway and all the config, plus you would have to be familiar with dos switches

If you've done an upgrade you should have an uninstall option in the add/remove programs control panel applet. Otherwise, you should be able to install a fresh copy of windows me by renaming the windows and program files directories to something else (eg oldwin and oldprog) and installing to a new windows directory.

Originally posted by Mr Flibble
If you've done an upgrade you should have an uninstall option in the add/remove programs control panel applet. Otherwise, you should be able to install a fresh copy of windows me by renaming the windows and program files directories to something else (eg oldwin and oldprog) and installing to a new windows directory.

Beuatiful! It worked like a charm. Thanks a lot.