XP SP2 to Vista Ultimate Upgrade

I have a home built PC (circa 2005) with a Tyan S2665 SCSI motherboard and a RAID 0 Adaptec board 2010S for my C drive. My error, I "assume"d that an upgrade to Vista would be okay .... NOT! Adaptec is not planning on upgrading the drivers and I cannot find any Vista drivers on Tyan's website (don't know if that means it will or will not work with Vista. In any event, I am stuck and need to go back to XP. Is there an easy way to "uninstall" Vista? What do you recommend? I would like to do something analagous to an XP repair NOT a reinstall. Help please ...

 

I think things may have gone too far for a recovery this graceful, but hopefully another geek can correct me.

What I would advise is backing up all your important documents (if any) to a USB stick, or to CD/DVD, or even another hard drive.

Then, you could use Darik's Boot And Nuke to write zeroes to the hard drive (as you cannot install XP over Vista directly), and then proceed with an XP installation, as per normal.

 

I have an Acronis True Image backup that is somewhat dated. Can I use that to "restore" XP SP2?

 

If you have a workable XP image, and the necessary boot media for Acronis, that should do the trick.

I haven't used Acronis software to format Vista yet, so you ~*may*~ still need to use DBAN to wipe the drive, but you should definitely be able to do it after that.

 

If you installed vista, under c drive you will find a folder called windows old, you can drag, right click send to, any of your data you want to keep and burn it down. I believe you will need to do a complete install of xp. ed

 

Okay ... after some research (at Tom's Hardware), it appears that the Adaptec SCSI device is supported although I could not tell from Adaptec's site. If that is the case, what would be my next steps? Whenever I had to reinstall/repair Windows XP, I always was given the option to load alternative SCSI drivers from the A drive. I am not presented with that option when I boot Vista. If I press f8 on bootup, I get the traditional menu of options including safe mode, etc. Can I go to command prompt or debugging mode to fix??? If so, what do I need to do?? Thanks once again ...

 

Yes it reboots.