Replacing Vista with XP

[the chesterbusker]

I am trying to boot into XP with my Sony laptop, at the moment running Vista. I have read that if you select 'boot from cd' in the BIOS, XP will overwrite Vista. There is no option to boot from cd in the BIOS options. Should I select from 1 of 7 options and risk it ?

 

[hang-the-9]

First, does the laptop have XP drivers? Second, when you boot from the XP disk, it will pause and say "hit any key to boot from CD", hit a key and it will boot from the XP setup disk. I think you misread some info about this boot from cd, the BIOS option will allow you to select the boot order the system takes, hard Drive, CD, USB drive, etc..., it does not affect how the OS will get setup, only what order the laptop looks at for a bootable drive.

 

[the chesterbusker]

Hi, Thank you for that. I bit the bullet and did it and it worked, except that as you pointed out the problem of drivers. There are a few but not the important ones, like for getting me on line. I am writing this on my Toshiba laptop. Any ideas where I should look.
Steve.

 

[hang-the-9]

If you can't find XP drivers from Sony downloads, go back to Vista, or Win 7 if it has drivers for that.

 

[the chesterbusker]

Thank you.