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Changing edition of Vista down
Abels
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I am downgrading from Vista Ultimate to Business on my computer (both 64-bit), but do not want to lose my hundreds of gigs of data. Does anyone know of an easy way to do this? I could:
- install business over ultimate, and hope that it works (does anyone have experience doing this? Does Vista's install wipe the partition before installing on it?).
- buy a second hard drive to back up my data (too much for DVDs) and use Windows Easy Transfer, wipe the system drive, and install from scratch
- ???
- install business over ultimate, and hope that it works (does anyone have experience doing this? Does Vista's install wipe the partition before installing on it?).
- buy a second hard drive to back up my data (too much for DVDs) and use Windows Easy Transfer, wipe the system drive, and install from scratch
- ???
Abels on
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I just tried it, on a 32 bit system, it does allow me to run Business setup on Ultimate, warning that the old OS will be moved to Windows.old; I don't have a 64 bit Ultimate handy, but it should be exactly the same.
It's not an 'upgrade' just a new install, and it did say that I won't be able to use the old OS.
I've never used Easy Transfer though, I mainly work with clean Vista installs (at a 'large software company in the Pacific Northwest')
You can generally upgrade from one edition to a 'higher' one (Home to Premium, Business, or Ultimate; Premium or Business to Ultimate) but downgrading while keeping settings is just plain unsupported. Imagine if you were using drive encryption, or joined to a domain... your machine might become unusable by trying to keep inapplicable settings.
In any case, backups are always good to have.