[P2420] Vista to XP downgrade

[discusgroup]

Hi

Anybody experience of vista to xp downgrade?

Bought new Esprimo last week, would not downgrade - tech support advised to upgrade bios - duly did still not possible - just get a blue screen fujitsu siemens logo in top corner and occassional messages popping to screen saying insert twinload downgrade DVD - which is already in the drive - so I click ok after about 15 mins the same message pops up again.

Machine was returned and replaced.

Same problem with new machine.

I think the disc supplied is either at fault or Vista cannot be downgraded to XP

Microsoft seem to have nothing specific about this process on their site

Any user with real experience able to help before I return the machine to Fujitsu

Many thanks

[niterock]

OK ... so I solved my own problem in the end ... not to my satisfaction and no thanks to FS tech supp or warranty department who passed me from pillar to post an would take no responsibility for the problem! Rant over!

You have to attach an external USB DVD drive to your PC ... press F12 at boot up to select the boot device ... select the USB DVD drive having already inserted the XP Twinload DVD ... Agree to downgrade and off it goes ... when it asks to reboot unplug the USB DVD and then reboot ... XP starts up just fine ... The DVD drive works perfectly under XP from then on.

This does not address the issue of Vista Business not being able to read or access the DVD drive in its pre installed state ... I've tried changing the DVD drive, the HDD and upgraded the BIOS ... nothing works ... I've had 3 of these machines so far from eBuyer ... all the same (no blame on eBuyer!).

As with most things in life "Vista" is a pretty view, not an operating system

Jimmy

Cross posted to other threads with similar issues! ... FS will probably moderate as I've been critical.

[mlcomps]

Thanks for that solution Jimmy, I was at the end of my tether. I too have had same problem downgrading to XP using the twinload CD. Spoke to technical today who advised a BIOS update but it had no effect whatsoever. I spent a full day chasing my tail around with two identical machines. I have had four of these units to date and only one did the downgrade without squealing. It really isn't good enough, and the technical advice isn't much better.

[MikeEdwards]

Well, I've just done this without any trouble at all, and we ship quite a lot of FSC machines and do the same on all of them. It's time-consuming, sure, but I haven't had any trouble or needed to use external drives or anything like that. I dare say we'd be buying something else if we had to go through that rigmarole for each PC.

My situation just now was a little more complex as I also wanted to upgrade the HDD at the same time, so I had to first install VB from the supplied recovery disc, then run the downgrade (as the downgrade needs to see VB on the hard disk drive), but it all worked just fine. Annoyingly, I tried installing from a standard XP Pro SP2 disc, but the drivers disc that comes with the Esprimo P5720 doesn't include any XP drivers, the only way to get them (if you don't have internet access because you don't have a NIC driver) is to use the supplied twin-load disc, then they're all pre-loaded.

Generally for the PCs we sell, they just go out with the standard OS. One thing, though, is that in those cases we never actually boot from the HDD and go through the initial Vista setup, we just switch on and stick the XP disc in from first boot. It would be nicer if the choice of OS could be done during initial setup, from the HDD, like used to happen in the days of Windows 2000 / Windows XP twinload machines (showing my age there).

[henri999]

Hi
I just got a request to downgrade two FS Esprimo P2411 machines running Vista Home Basic to XP. But these machines were sourced at EBuyer and the company has no media (i.e. No OS disks or what seems to be called twinload CDs)
Before I get in deep water here can somebody answer these questions:
A: What if I just re-format HDD and install XP Pro from scratch? (I would buy new OEM licenses). What problems could arise?
B: Is there any place I can check beforehand regarding XP drivers for these systems?
I joined this forum just for these answers. Both machines are virtually identical.
Thanks for any advice.