NT 2000 to XP upgrade

Here's my dilemma. I attempted to upgrade from Windows
2000 NT Professional to Windows XP Professional. After
several attempts to upgrade and being aborted because of
applications not compatible with XP I loaded XP as new.
While it successfully loaded and launches none of the
programs running under W2000 are available. I now have
two versions loaded and can select either W2000 or XP at
boot up. When I access the control panel to Add/Remove
programs however nothing is present in either version. I
set about trying to remove XP but it does not appear in
control panel to uninstall.
What now?

[Ed Sproull [MSFT]]

That is correct. You have managed to install a second OS and it will not
see any of the programs installed by the first OS. Here are some options.

My best suggestion is to format the drive, install only the one OS, XP and
install your programs to that OS. That might seem a bit drastic but it will
clean things up a bit. Having two OS's on one disk can have unknown side
effects.

You can get rid of the second OS by deleting it manually. The problem if you
get the wrong directories you will trash the first OS. To delete it, fist
determine which directory it is installed to. Most likely c:\windows. You
can delete that directory and all of its subdirectories. You can check the
dates the directory was made to make sure you get the correct. Next you
might (not required) want to edit your boot.ini to remove the boot option
for that OS and set the default back to you Windows 2000 directory. The
c:\boot.ini file will also tell you which directory each OS is installed
into. If you aren't familiar with this file, I suggest leaving it alone. A
mistake here and you will be in deep doodo. Getting rid of the Documents
and Settings directory the Program Files directories might be a little more
tricky. Be careful not to delete stuff that your Win2K install needs.

Hope this helps. Ed.


> wrote in message
...
> Here's my dilemma. I attempted to upgrade from Windows
> 2000 NT Professional to Windows XP Professional. After
> several attempts to upgrade and being aborted because of
> applications not compatible with XP I loaded XP as new.
> While it successfully loaded and launches none of the
> programs running under W2000 are available. I now have
> two versions loaded and can select either W2000 or XP at
> boot up. When I access the control panel to Add/Remove
> programs however nothing is present in either version. I
> set about trying to remove XP but it does not appear in
> control panel to uninstall.
> What now?
>