Need Advice On How To Go To Vista 32 From Vista 64
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Gnomie Nate Wright writes:
Hey Chris, I’ve got a problem. I built a computer last summer around June and (like an idiot) I bought most of my parts without doing any real research. I didn’t know very much about computers and thinking that it was going to be really good I went and bought Vista 64 bit over Vista 32 bit. I have experienced many problems from SLI not working but in fact slowing down my FPS, to just nonstop computer crashes. Now I’m ready to go and buy a vista 32 bit OEM version but I have a problem: I have a lot of content stored on my computer. I currently have a 250 GB SATA hard drive and I only have around 100 gigs free, so I need some way to back up all that content. I don’t really want to use DVDs because that would just seem like a huge waste, and I don’t want to buy an external hard drive because they are more expensive for less space. So basically I have three questions:
- Is it possible to perform an upgrade from Vista Premium 64 bit to Vista Premium 32 bit so that I don’t lose any content, or am I seriously going to have to either buy an external HDD or a crap-ton of DVDs?
- Is there a way (if I get another internal SATA drive) to partition both my hard drives so that they are both recognized as the C: drive and their storage is combined? Or would they be recognized as two different partitions?
- Would it be possible to install Vista on a new HDD and then somehow transfer the files from the old HDD (which would still have Vista on it) to the new one with Vista installed?
Sorry if any of this is unclear. I didn’t really know how to state some of these questions… I’m more of a wannabe computer geek than a real one like you (that’s meant to be a compliment, by the way). Any help would be greatly appreciated; so far I have failed to find any information on these things.
BTW: Those April Fools’ Day jokes were hilarious. I can’t believe that people thought that you actually hated the iPhone because the icons “jiggled,” and you were switching back to Windows XP for Microsoft Paint! Keep up the good work!
2 Comments
Jerry
April 9th, 2008
at 5:07am
The easiest answer is a second internal hard drive with the same or greater capacity as the C: drive, and then you can make selective backups to it as you choose. If the second drive is big enough you can also put all your software installation files on it, for those inevitable occasions when you need to reinstall Vista and all your software. You can’t have two C: drives but (if your motherboard supports it) you can do a RAID 1 configuration for instant and automatic mirroring to a second drive of everything that is wirtten to the C: drive. Not sure if this RAID mirror drive is usable in a new installation of Vista. As for upgrading (and downgrading), Microsoft has created such a mess of complexities when upgrading from and to various versions, and also such a dangerous, nearly impassable minefield of piracy protection measures, that in respect to your blood pressure you had better just do a clean install, once you have a second hard drive nicely holding all the files that you want to keep. When you have that, you can pretty much do any experiments you like and you won’t lose anything at all. Be brave, be dauntless, and safely BACKUP your precious files.
bug_Chas3r
April 9th, 2008
at 10:14am
Regarding the mounting of a secondary drive into a Vista box; your question 2. I’ve read (but as yet un-tried) it is possible to go to the second drive root. Right click and select from the dialog box, a mount point (an empty folder) or click to create a new mount point, on the first drive. The effect is to have the second drive mounted on the root of the first drive. The effect is to extend the tree to include optional drives as part of the native filesystem. So the process would be to have the newly installed drive be the boot drive and the orginal drive ‘mounted’ to the new 32bit OS. Hope this helps!