Our company has lately purchased a group of Esprimo 5730 PCs, with Windows Vista Operating system preinstalled on all of them.
The current situation of our company’s database applications makes it obligatory to downgrade the operating system to Windows XP as it has been proven that our major applications will cause conflicts and might not work properly on worksatations working with Windows Vista, our IT department is working on this problem at this moment and are working on fixing the databases to be more reliable and stable when working with Windows Vista OS installed on the workstations.
So under the circumstances we are working on downgrading the operating system on the group of Esprimo 5730 to Windows XP but before proceeding with this step there have been some major concerns regarding this procedure as they bring up the following questions:
1- Incase of formatting the HDD to install the new operating system (Win XP) will it be possible to restore the Windows Vista OS at a later time through System Recovery?
2- There are currently (by factory settings) several partitions on the 160GB HDD, one of them is hidden named (WINREC) with 2GBs of data and 2 partitions with a total of 140GBs. The rest of the 160GB HDD storage area is hidden or not accessible. So at this point the question is as follows,
a. Is the rest of the storage area hidden also as extended data for the recovery partition or not?
b. And incase that this assumption is true, is this data recoverable or accessible incase that partition C on the HDD is formatted in order to install Windows XP?
3- Incase of intending to recover Windows Vista OS due to a system crash or any other reason from the recovery partition, how is this procedure executed or how is the recovery partition accessed in order to restore the system to the factory settings from system recovery as we have not found any option or function key during system boot that enables this option?
4- Is there a certain software utility that Fujitsu Siemens provides in order to enable users to locate the system recovery partition and execute the recovery tools and restore the PC to its original state?
5- Is it possible to create system recovery CD/DVD from within the Windows Vista OS to use for restoring the system?