Hi Jayant, You have a lovely site. The problem that I am facing with Vista is that I am not able to delete the main folders of Vista. I have tried booting with other OS, or even Vista from other Drives. I tried connecting the drive from which I want to delete Vista as Slave and also as an external USB Drive. I have even disabled the User Imporant File protection but all in vein. Please guide me know how I can delete those folders and free that space. I just want to get rid of Vista.
- Vishal

Thanks Vishal.

In order to safely remove Vista and get back that Windows XP’s bootloader we need to perform the following steps:-

1. Boot into Windows XP
2. Open Command Prompt. To open command prompt click ‘Start’ > ‘Run’. Type ‘cmd’ without quotes and press OK.
3. Type ‘cd c:\boot\’ , (where ‘c:’ is your Windows XP’s installation drive) without quotes and press Enter key.
4. Now type the command ‘fixntfs -xp’ without quotes and press Enter key.
5. Restart the machine. Windows XP’s bootloader should be back now.
6. Save any data that you wish to keep from the Windows Vista partition by copying it into the Windows XP’s partition.
7. Now lets format the Windows Vista partition. If you do not wish to format your Vista partition, but just delete the Vista files, skip to step 10. Go to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management.
8. Click on Disk Management.
9. Right click the Windows Vista’s partition and click Format and follow the instructions.
10. If you do not wish to format your partition and just wish to delete the Windows Vista’s folders, you can follow the steps given in “Permission denied” - Data recovery in Windows XP. Follow the steps that talk about taking ownership of the data/ folders to take ownership of Windows Vista’s folders. One you have taken the ownership of the Windows Vista folders you will be able to delete them.