Hello.

I started this post in the XP forum as I was trying to downgrade to XP on a second HD with the intention of making that the main or at least having a dual boot system. Anyway, I've come to the conclusion that my system doesn't like XP so am just trying to restore Vista on the original drive.

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I have a HP m8190a system with a HP w2207 monitor.

For a number of reasons, I decided to install a second HD and 2GB more RAM, with the intention of installing XP on the new drive. Which I have done, but it seems like I can't get XP to recognise any of my hardware - its all coming up generic. Drivers don't seem to help.

In the XP install the drive was assigned letter D, which was also the letter for the Recovery partition on the HP Vista drive. Which, I assume, must be why when I select the HP Vista drive on the boot menu it loads XP instead of Vista. Guessing the boot info was in that section? Or could there be another reason for this?

So I called HP and they are sending me the recovery disks, which should be here in 3-5 days. What I am wondering is whether this will re-format my system, as if I was reinstalling Vista? Or will it just act in place of the Recovery partition, allowing me to boot to my original drive (which is still entirely intact, just not bootable)?

Also, being that I am impatiently wanting my computer back, what would happen if I used the registry to change the drive letters? So change D (XP boot drive) to N (or something) and K (Recovery Partition on Vista HP C drive) to D.

I found a help file that tells you how to do it (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/223188), however I'm not sure whether this will just make the one bootable drive I have unbootable, or whether it will make the original hd bootable. I don't mind if I lose the current drive (which is just a fresh install of XP) as long as I get the old drive back on bootup.

What I have is:

Disk0: HP C (system) | K Recovery
Disk1: D (boot)

and what I want is:

Disk0: HP C (boot) | D Recovery
Disk1: N

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Any ideas, suggestions, answers or fresh perspectives would be welcome. Thanks in advance

The recovery disks will wipe everything out and restore your system to the state it was in the day that it left the factory.
The article doesn't include Vista in the list of supported OS's - but I can't see any harm in trying it anyway (but only scanned it quickly).
I'd suggest getting the hard drive out and slaving it to another machine to save your data before doing anything else - that way, should thinks get messed up, you won't have lost your data.