Check out:

http://www.windowsreinstall.com/install/uninstall/winxp.htm, or search for "osuninst.exe" 
from Google. There you'll even find pages at Annoyances.org.

However, I have two OS installed on my computer -- 1 on each of two partitions (as 
it should be, as this doesn't mess up each one's Registry, etc.). I just want to 
remove XP, which was installed fresh on a separate partition (not on top of another 
OS). The easiest was is to simply wipe and reformat the XP partition. However I was 
concerned that this would leave the boot-up options (which let you choose which of 
the OS to boot) intact and unabl;e to remove them. As it turned out, you can just 
delete XP and worry about that later, though, as I describe below.

1. Create a Win98 bootable floppy (format + copy system files)
2. Copy c:\windows\command\attrib.exe and sys.com to the floppy
3. Reboot using the floppy. Type A:\sys c: (if C: is the partition you want to keep 
which has Win98 on it, and D: contains XP). This will restore the original booting 
option to be Win98-only by restoring the system (i.e. bootup) files.
4. (this step may not be necessary, though it won't hurt, either) You'll get an error 
that it couldn't copy command.com. If so, then type "A:\attrib -S -H c:\comamnd.com", 
"del c:\command.com" and "copy c:\windows\command.com c:\command.com"
5. Reboot without the floppy. It should go straight to Win98 without the XP options 
screen.
6. Delete c:\boot.ini, ntdetect.exe and ntldr. These are hidden files, so you'll 
have to make them visible first (View->Options->uncheck not displaying hidden files).
7. Wipe and reformat your d: partition. Goodbye XP!

-----------------

Additional stuff I checked (just details, unnecessary for the removal of XP, but 
left for completeness sake):

Hence before deleting the partition (or running the directions from the link referenced 
above) I wanted to first make the other OS the default OS in the bootup process. 
This is done in WinXP Pro (and probably Home, too) as follows:

- Right-click on "My Computer" and choose "Properties".
- Select the "Advanced" tab.
- Click the "Settings" button under "Startup and Recovery".
- Change the drop-down list to the other OS.
- (optional) change the "Time to display list of OS" to 0-2 seconds

And then I discovered the "To edit the startup options file manually, click Edit" 
button, which opens the "boot.ini" which is stored in the root directory of the active 
(FDISK) partition. Voila!

I discovered a bunch of other system files there, too, and made a copy of them. This 
copy turned out to be important when I hadn't copied "sys.com" to the bootable floppy 
and needed to reboot to Win98, but couldn't without these deleted files.

I then tried to follow the link's instructions via MSDOS (for FAT partitions), and 
that didn't work. From Safe Mode with Command Prompt it worked, but the program told 
me that it couldn't uninstall XP because it didn't have the necessary registration 
information. I didn't know what that was (and couldn't find out from the web), but 
assumed that it meant that I had to activate my XP installation before I could uninstall 
it. Gee. I didn't want to do that because of the annoying activation process, but 
did so, anyway, to no effect. Then MS tech support told me how to do it, which are 
the 8 steps I wrote at the top.

- osuninst.exe will only work if XP was installed on top of another OS, i.e. not 
if it was a clean install on a new partition. They mention that in the KB article 
for the Add/remove programs option, but not for the osuninst.exe option.







On Tuesday, December 18, 2001 at 4:01 pm, stephanie wrote:
>I have a question about How 
>do I uninstall Windows 98?:

>
>how do i uninstall windows xp

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