Help me to understand this strange behavior when downgrading from Win 7 to XP

Factual Questions
1

I’m at a hospital at the moment and one of my treatments is ergotherapy. When one of the therapists heard that I’m an IT guy by trade, he asked me to help me with a software problem (Yeah, everywhere I go and tell that I’m in IT I’m asked about computer troubles, that’s just the way it is ;)). As usual in such environments they are working with really old hardware, and except one machine all their PCs still run XP. They are mainly used to run one special, very vintage therapy software called cogpack. I was asked to install it on the only Win 7 machine they recently acquired, but I soon saw that it’s a 16 bit application, so no dice on Win 7. I proposed to wipe Win 7 and install XP instead to be able to install that software and was given green light.

Now, I’ve installed Win XP probably hundreds of times, but it’s been a while. So as usual, I booted from an install CD and started the familiar installation process. I remember that the XP install had a basic partition manager and you had the option to wipe existing partitions and create and format new ones. Somehow this step was skipped this time, and the installation at one point started formatting the system partition (the only partition on the drive) without even prompting (!), which already seemed strange to me. But I thought, what the heck, I’d formatted it anyway, so I proceeded with the rest of installation which went as I’ve known it. Now comes the even stranger part:

The old Win 7 installation had two user accounts, one called “administrator” and one other user, both accounts had administrative privileges. After the installation was completed and the machine rebooted, it skipped the usual step of basic settings including adding a user account, instead it booted to the XP login screen with the two former Win 7 accounts :eek:. The big problem was that I didn’t have the password for the “administrator” account, and the other account I knew the password to and also had admin privileges on Win 7 had been changed to “restricted user”, so the whole installation had been useless because I couldn’t really work with the machine without being administrator.

Now I ask my fellow IT folks here: how is this possible? The old system and seemingly only partition had been reformatted, so where did the system get the old account data from? And how can a XP installation import such info from a former Win 7 installation? When XP was released, Win 7 was seven years in the making, so how could such an import of data even be anticipated? I’m really puzzled about this behavior.

I’m at home this weekend and will return to the hospital on Monday, so as a workaround I plan to bring a bootable CD with Gparted (Unix partition manager) and wipe everything on that machine once and for all and try again to install XP from scratch. I’m confident that this will work, but I still want to know what happened.

2

Sorry, brain fart in the OP: Gparted is a *Linux *program, not Unix.

3

A wild guess - it did not format the partition, and picked up the user configurations from the existing data (SAM?). it simply overwrote the windows folder with the XP files, maybe doing a repair instead. Most likely, like a lot of Microsoft “improvements”, the underlying SAM format has not changed enough to crap off the XP version, so it reads the userid’s out of the SAM. I assume this was a SP3 install.

(You see a lot of Windows stuff where once you run the pretty front end, the underlying system controls are exactly the same panels whether in XP or Win10. Basically, a new coat of paint but the same rotten floorboards. )

4

I think you’re on the right track, it must have been something like you guessed. I assumed that the partition had been formatted during installation because I watched the progress bar until completion and a message like “formatting completed” or something like that, but we all know that Microsoft software sometimes tricks you into believing things that never happened…

ETA: and of course it was a dick move to change the administrative user to restricted. Damn you, Microsoft!

5

you can run 16 bit programs on Windows 7, but it must be the 32-bit version of 7.

reason being is that the NT Virtual DOS Machine (NTVDM) relies on the CPU’s “Virtual 8086 Mode.” When AMD designed x86-64, they removed the capability of using virtual 8086 when the CPU is in 64-bit mode.

6

I am astonished that, a - they asked you to do this and, b - that you agreed.

A hospital should surely have a contract with a computer maintenance company who would be familiar with their systems. If you had caused some major problem, would you be insured well enough to cover what could be a major cost? How could they know that you would not take the opportunity to create some ‘back door’ into their network that would give you access?

7

This was an ass old stand alone machine and wasn’t connected to any network, let alone with web access. I wouldn’t have tinkered with any net access at all.

8

Out of curiosity, why do you need to install an entire operating system to run one 16-bit program? Won’t it run under one of Wine, DOSBox, Virtualbox, FreeDOS? (The virtual-machine mode may involve some minor installation but not in a way that would wipe out your OS).

ETA the cogpack FAQ claims it runs on Windows 7 and 10, so they must be using an old version.

9

Furthermore, you could download Microsoft Virtual PC and, if this was Windows 7 Professional, a prebuilt copy of Windows XP for free. (This is in support of a Windows 7 Professional feature called “XP Mode”.)

Also free, and IMO a superior product, is the free version of VMware Workstation Player. I have it running under Windows 7 on two different computers supporting a guest version of Windows XP. It even has a feature called unity mode which makes the guest OS appear to be running natively on the real machine. It’s actually been quite useful for one or two oddball things that only run on Windows XP.

10

See, I know this, but I didn’t have other means, not even web access, in that place and with that machine other than ditching Win 7 and installing XP. It’s a work shop in the basement of the hospital used for ergotherapy with a hodgepodge of about five or six old, old stand alone PCs that have been donated to the institution which exclusively serve to run cogpack for the patients. Nothing else except cogpack and the Windows standard programs are installed on these machines, and nothing else is ever done with it.

I don’t know the exact version number for their cogpack version, but the files on the installation disc have a time stamp from 1999, so it’s even pre-XP. It’s all very amateurish, and I don’t think these PCs are even administered by the hospital’s IT staff, but the therapists occasionally install the program on these old machines, but became overchallenged when the install failed on a newly donated machine that even had Win 7 (!) preinstalled that’s also at least 8 years old or so. So they asked me to help, and I wanted to be helpful and chose the next best solution at hand, and that was installing XP on that machine. It’s no big deal, really.

11

Free for private, presonal use. Or is there a new version?

12

Yes, you’re right, VMware wouldn’t be free for an institutional environment like a hospital. The MS Virtual PC option would still be available, though. I just can’t speak to how good it is.

13

As long as we’re brainstorming, it sounds like what would really help the hospital would be a custom CD that automatically wipes the system disk of a donated computer and copies onto it a pre-built disk image with an operating system (just use DOS if the program is that old) and cogplan already installed, making it easy for a non-expert to do. And/or they could cough up the €119 for the latest version which is known to work on 64-bit Windows and includes bug fixes.

14

That sounds like a problem to me, too. If those machines (donated or not) are being used in the hospital, somebody there ought to have the Administrator password.

15

I would be surprised if somebody there did. If the group donating the machines failed to scrub the drives like they are supposed to, they might arrive with working installations of Windows, but it’s not likely the password would be written down anywhere. The worse failure is that of the hospital staff using them in that state; that’s how you get Stuxnet, your entire network hacked (even without a direct 'net connection), your medical records stolen, and a huge front-page scandal.