I have an Acer laptop that I was asked to format for a friend. It came with Home Premium x32 pre-installed on it. Everything I have tried so far, has not worked. I have a Ultimate x64 OEM disk, a Home Premium x32 OEM disk, and an XP disk. When I tried to boot from CD, nothing comes up, it just starts windows right away. I went into the BIOS and changed it so the cdrom boots up first, and still nothing worked, windows just starts right away. The Ultimate cd and the XP cd have both been used plenty of times on other computers, so they both work for sure. When I go into My Computer, and open the Home Premium disk, it asks if I want to run the setup.exe and I hit yes, then it just does nothing. When I run the Ultimate disk, it says that it can't run because it's x64 and the laptop is only a x32. When I run the xp disk, the install option is greyed out. When I go to disk management, the 'Format...' is greyed out. I was wondering if I could get any help on anything I might be doing wrong or what the problem might be. I'm looking at the sticky to go from Vista > XP. Need to check if the computer has the drivers for XP. Any help would be appreciated! Thanks.

"When I tried to boot from CD, nothing comes up" Vista is on DVD not CD. Does the Acer have a DVD reader? As for XP, is the HDD a SATA drive? if so you will need to load a SATA driver for the Acer and XP with at least SP1 incorporated on the CD. Next do you have all the required XP drivers for the Acer? And finally why the need to format the existing instalation? what problems are you having? The Acer should have a restore partition that brings it back as was when new, unless this has been deleted.

Some Acer's do not have a restore partition but requests creating a Restore DVD. You can not use the OEM Vista CoA with a retail/oem Vista DVD.

These discs of yours, are they burnt discs? And even they were burnt copies made from bootable originals, you shouldn't be having the problems you describe above. You sure you aren't doing something wrong? What model is your machine? Jabbering Idiots: Everywhere You Look!

anmor: I was using the term CD is a general sense. It is on a DVD though. I checked and it doesn't have all the drivers XP needs. The problem is that I can ping sites, but can't browse them. I've tried everything I've read about to fix it, but nothing worked. Where is this restore option that will bring it back to when it was new? itguru: I never knew that.. that's really crappy. Sabertooth: They are burnt. I'm pretty sure I'm not doing anything wrong.. well I probably am, I just don't know it. I can't remember the exact model. I'm sorry.