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[slothman]

Hello,

Hopefully this tutorial will work for everyone. I tested it on Windows 7 to XP downgrade only, but I would think the same would apply for any winnt32-based setup. This technique comes in very handy for systems where the bios boot options are very limited.

Also note that this is not the only way to accomplish this task. There are others. One of which is booting a ramload-based pe and installing XP/2000/2003 from there.

First make sure you disable UAC, it really gets in the way of this whole process.
Click on the start button, click on control panel, type in UAC in the search box at the top, then click on either "turn user account control (UAC) on or off" or "Change User account control settings"
Either uncheck use UAC to protect your computer and click ok
or move the slider down to never notify and click ok.

Now reboot the computer to make sure UAC is properly disabled.

Next grab a copy of Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.6 here:
Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.6

Install it, and then open compatibility administrator.

Expand Applications (click on plus to the left of it)

Scroll down to Windows Setup and click on it.

On the right side of the screen there will be two groups you want to disable. Left click on each and disable them so they have what looks like a no smoking sign on each (lol)

Now you can navigate to your XP/2000/2003 install and run winnt32.exe

Make sure you select advanced options and name the windows directory something different than what's there already. You also want to select copy all setup files to disk.

After setup has completed, do not reboot, we have one more thing to take care of.

Optionally, you can edit the winnt.sif in one of the $WIN_NT$ directories at the root of the drive to change the location of the "Program Files" directory. I didn't do this and XP still worked fine, but if you want Win7/Vista/2008 to still work fine you will need to have it renamed.

Now we want to install grub4dos to the mbr of the hard disk. We need to do this because XP/2000/2003 setup royally screws this up, resulting in an unbootable system.

Download grubinst from here: grubinst-1.1-bin-w32-2008-01-01.zip

And grub4dos from here: Official grub4dos

or here: chenall's grub4dos

I prefer chenall's, but use whichever you would like.

Extract grubinst 1.1 to a folder and run grubinst_gui.exe

Select disk and select your hard drive from the dropdown box on the right. Now click install at the bottom.

Extract grub4dos to a folder and copy grldr to the root directory of your hard drive (usually C:)

Open notepad and paste these few lines. Click save as and navigate to the root directory of your hard drive and name it menu.lst

# Start menu.lst
title Windows Setup
find --set-root /$WIN_NT$.~BT/SETUPLDR.BIN
chainloader /$WIN_NT$.~BT/SETUPLDR.BIN
# End menu.lst

Hopefully that should be it.