It won’t let him; in his words, it gives him a message basically saying ‘you don’t want this, it’s old’ and halts the operation.
Might anyone know the way to “downgrade” from XP to 2000?
Has he tried doing a clean install?
Yep, you’ll pretty much have to wipe the HD clean. Is the Win2k disk a full setup disc or an upgrade?
You’d definately want to make a different partition for W2k. Either get a copy of Partition Magic or some other utility (USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!!) and shrink the current XP partition down to size. Or you boot to the CD (if it’s bootable), delete the current partition (which will make you lose all the data) and then make 2 partitions: 1 for XP and 1 for W2k and install them separetly by booting to the respective cd of the OS.
Another option (if the machine has good enough specs) is to do an install using Virtual PC.
Every known Micorsoft OS gives a “WTF?!?” response to being downgraded, and rightfully so.
If you must install Windows 2000 over XP, then boot off the CD to wipe the XP install and start over as a 2000 install. If you want to keep XP and have 2000 too (Lord knows why), then just partition the hard drive as necassary and then install Windows 2000. If you have XP and want to install 2000 for testing then VMWare or Virtual PC is the way to go.
One good reason is that the user might have software which won’t run under XP.
Such as?