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Vista to XP help please

beesonthewhatnow

beesonthewhatnow

going deaf for a living
Right, I've bought a new laptop that came with vista pre installed. This is useless to me, so I need to get rid of it and put XP on it.

I've got a bootable XP install disk, but when the XP install starts it tells me that no hard drives have been detected in my machine, so installation cannot continue.

What the fuck? It has got drives in it, it bloody well boots Vista fine!

Any ideas? :confused:
 
I suspect that the machine has some sort of restore partition on it that is preventing the XP from seeing the partition on it. What I recommend is formatting the laptop first using a utility such as Darik's Boot and Nuke (dban) or Ultimate Boot Disk or partition maic or something.
FOrmat it then try and boot into the XP disk.
 
It's not that it can't see any partition, it's saying "setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer" - the XP install usually lets you re-partition the drive but it's not even getting to that point.
 
You will probably need to load additional SATA drivers - from memory you are prompted to press F6 or something to install additional drivers from a CD/floppy whilst the setup is loading - in order for XP to recognise your laptop's hard drive. Anything other than bog-standard IDE seems to confuse it.

If it is a mainstream brand, the manufacturers website should be able to furnish you with these files.
 
*thinks back*


Um - actually yes, I think I found a fairly generic one for the particular SATA chipset on the MoBo last time I had to do this......

As I recall.....very vaguely......I got it from the ASUS website as *gasp* It was an ASUS MoBo!
 
I'm considering doing the same thing. As I understand it you just need to get the SATA drivers for your model of drive. The tricky thing is if, as is likely, you don't have a floppy to install the SATA drivers before you install the XP OS. The solution I found was nlite which will enable you to put the SATA drivers and XP installation on to one CD, so you can bung it into your machine and it will load things in the right order.
 
Right a quick google seem to inply that I need to get the sata driver onto a floppy disk.

Errrr, except my laptop dosen't have a floppy drive.

Something tells me this is going to be a long day :(
 
Two possible work arounds from here:

Users can install Windows XP or Windows XP SP2 (Service Pack 2) on an AHCI enabled system by changing BIOS setting to disable AHCI (or RAID which includes AHCI in its functions) and use native SATA IDE emulation mode (SATA/PATA). In SATA IDE Emulation mode, XP setup could find the SATA drives and proceed to continue to install XP properly. How to change the BIOS settings on SATA mode is depending on which brand or model or even motherboard of your computer system. Check your system manual for more information. For example, in Dell Precision workstation, press F2 to go into BIOS, and then go to “SATA Management” to select AHCI or SATA mode. If you don’t find any option in BIOS to change AHCI support for SATA ports, most probably the drives already runs in IDE (ATA) emulation mode and therefore doesn’t require the AHCI driver. It’s because AHCI support is depending on the chipset (commonly by Intel) and the HDD. In this case, you have to figure out what’s other causes that may stop your SATA disks from functioning.
Click to expand...

A slightly more difficult but recommended method is to create a slipstreamed XP install disc with the Intel Matrix Storage Manager which is also the AHCI SATA Controller driver included. A slipstreamed XP setup CD with AHCI SATA controller driver allows the XP OS to support hard disk on AHCI and use its advanced features such as NCQ for faster access, read and write speed. While slipstreaming, users can also have the advantage to include all updates for Windows XP for up-to-date patched OS, without the need to download and install hotfixes later.
Click to expand...

I actually used No.1 successfully trying to Ghost a recent Dell latitude laptop that I was having problems with.....but completely forgot I did it until I just read that article!

:D
 
Users can install Windows XP or Windows XP SP2 (Service Pack 2) on an AHCI enabled system by changing BIOS setting to disable AHCI (or RAID which includes AHCI in its functions) and use native SATA IDE emulation mode (SATA/PATA). In SATA IDE Emulation mode, XP setup could find the SATA drives and proceed to continue to install XP properly. How to change the BIOS settings on SATA mode is depending on which brand or model or even motherboard of your computer system. Check your system manual for more information. For example, in Dell Precision workstation, press F2 to go into BIOS, and then go to “SATA Management” to select AHCI or SATA mode. If you don’t find any option in BIOS to change AHCI support for SATA ports, most probably the drives already runs in IDE (ATA) emulation mode and therefore doesn’t require the AHCI driver. It’s because AHCI support is depending on the chipset (commonly by Intel) and the HDD. In this case, you have to figure out what’s other causes that may stop your SATA disks from functioning.
Click to expand...

This seems to be working :cool:

Now, does this mean that once I've done the install I can change the bios settings back to what they were, or do I need to leave them like that all the time?

If the latter, does this mean I'm not using my drives full performance? :confused:
 
Boris Sprinkler said:
lol. Can a USB drive not be used?
Click to expand...
I refuse to believe I have to buy a drive to install sodding XP....

Sometimes I really fucking hate microsoft :D


And the first person to say that I should have bought a Mac will get their balls cut off :D
 
beesonthewhatnow said:
Now, does this mean that once I've done the install I can change the bios settings back to what they were,
Click to expand...

yes, assuming that you have installed all of the Windows updates etc and - most importantly - installed the latest chipset/MoBo drivers for your laptop within XP.
 
beesonthewhatnow said:
Sometimes I really fucking hate microsoft :D


And the first person to say that I should have bought a Mac will get their balls cut off :D
Click to expand...

Well I did have to bite my tongue a little....


;)

I will be attempting my Tiger -> Leopard upgrade on my Macbook Pro tonight, so we shall see eh!
 
beesonthewhatnow said:
Right, I've bought a new laptop that came with vista pre installed. This is useless to me, so I need to get rid of it and put XP on it.

I've got a bootable XP install disk, but when the XP install starts it tells me that no hard drives have been detected in my machine, so installation cannot continue.

What the fuck? It has got drives in it, it bloody well boots Vista fine!

Any ideas? :confused:
Click to expand...

Some time ago there were a lot of Vista issues, a year on, there are less. Are you sure that things you want to run don't work? I think that its a better OS than XP thats all.
 
beesonthewhatnow said:
I refuse to believe I have to buy a drive to install sodding XP....

Sometimes I really fucking hate microsoft :D


And the first person to say that I should have bought a Mac will get their balls cut off :D
Click to expand...

Whats the decisions by the h/w manufacturers got to do with MS exactly?
 
Sunray said:
Some time ago there were a lot of Vista issues, a year on, there are less. Are you sure that things you want to run don't work? I think that its a better OS than XP thats all.
Click to expand...
AKAIK my version of Cubase won't run on Vista, which makes it a complete non starter for me. Neither will my audio interface. Or about every single other bit of kit I own.

Vista and pro audio don't mix.
 
Sunray said:
Some time ago there were a lot of Vista issues, a year on, there are less. Are you sure that things you want to run don't work? I think that its a better OS than XP thats all.
Click to expand...


Having run it for a while under bootcamp on my Macbook, I have personally come to the conclusion that it is certainly not a worse OS than XP (after numerous updates of course) but I have yet to see it do anything that would make it better or indeed an essential upgrade over XP in my eyes.

For me personally, I will go back to running XP under bootcamp in preference to Vista as it is significantly less bloated an install and I really don't want to use up more disk space than is necessary for Windows.

:)
 
OK, I've got to a XP desktop, downloaded the drivers for my video card, but the install program then says that it can't detect a supported card.

Fucking fuckity arse bollocks.


:mad: x 1 million
 
beesonthewhatnow said:
OK, I've got to a XP desktop, downloaded the drivers for my video card, but the install program then says that it can't detect a supported card.

Fucking fuckity arse bollocks.


:mad: x 1 million
Click to expand...

Do chipset first........if your GC is onboard, then that will likely install the card drivers along with everything else.


If not, then rather than run the install program, go into the XP hardware Device manager/list, find the display adaptor and "add/update drivers". Do the whole thing manually (don't let XP scan/find any drivers for you) and when the option appears, browse to the directory into which you have the video drivers (assuming that you have the individual files including the .inf and not just a single .exe*) and install them from there - that should work......



* if you don't have the drivers and .inf file, try laptopvideo2go.com

:)
 
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