remove vista trial and install mce

[jimmuurray1946]

my son crashed his machine that had XP home on it, he then had a trial or eval disk for vista premium and loaded it. There was an auto disable on vista and it eventually died. He bought a copy of MCE 2005 and when he tried to install mce it wouldn't let him since there was a newer os installed. He then tried to reformat the hdd to start over with the mce but has not been able to accomplish that. he has two hdd but has tried to disable main drive and boot to drive 2 but still no luck. I'm in California and he's in Colorado so I'm at a loss as to what to tell him. He does not have access to any on line machines so I have been advising him via phone. Anyone with a thought about how he can dump everything and install the new os?

[patio]

To eliminate confusion have him choose which drive he wants to use for MCE and hook it up as the master drive, he can unhook the other temporarily.
He should travel to bootdisk.com and grab a WinME bootdisk
The file just needs to be unzipped to a clean floppy.
Then put the floppy in and re-boot.
Type in format C: /U and hit Enter.
When it is finished it will ask for a volume label have him hit Enter for none.
Remove the floppy and put in the MCE CD.
Re-boot and the Windows setup should start.

[jimmuurray1946]

sounds good but he doesn't have access online. he called geek squad and they want $200 to load it for him

[patio]

Unbelieveable...can he have someone DLoad it for him and make a boot floppy ? ?
Another option would be to pull the HDD and format it in another machine...