Install XP Over Vista In SATA HDD, No Floppy Drive.
Discussion
My Sister has a laptop with vista basic installed in it.The 120 GB SATA HDD is partitioned into 2 with about 45 GB of personal files in drive D. She wants to get rid of Vista (in C dive) and install XP pro in its place. I think Windows XP will not recognise the SATA HDD until the SATA drivers are installed via a floppy, except the laptop has no floppy drive. Is there another way to do this?
Just had to do this recently.
If you can boot from the CD drive, use this utility to copy the drivers and XP onto a fresh CD and boot from that.
http://www.nliteos.com/
HTH
If you can boot from the CD drive, use this utility to copy the drivers and XP onto a fresh CD and boot from that.
http://www.nliteos.com/
HTH
As a warning, ensure you bag XP versions of all key drivers before you start.
I have a HP laptop that I wanted to do the same thing to, but because it was never realeased in anything other than Vista, the web site offered no XP drivers and because these were integrated OEM components, it proved a challenge to get the corret drivers. I got there, but only after about a couple of hours of serious digging (including doing nonsense like querying the hardware serial codes and Googling those to get some clue as to where I could locate the correct drivers).
At a minimum, you need the video and network adapter / WiFi drivers so that if you need to you can use the machine to hunt down the rest.
I have a HP laptop that I wanted to do the same thing to, but because it was never realeased in anything other than Vista, the web site offered no XP drivers and because these were integrated OEM components, it proved a challenge to get the corret drivers. I got there, but only after about a couple of hours of serious digging (including doing nonsense like querying the hardware serial codes and Googling those to get some clue as to where I could locate the correct drivers).
At a minimum, you need the video and network adapter / WiFi drivers so that if you need to you can use the machine to hunt down the rest.
If it's a fairly new laptop then there should be no problem with XP seeing the SATA drive. It's been a while since I needed to load drivers during setup & that's usually for RAID systems, SATA should be sorted in the BIOS.
Try it & see is the simple way.
Boot from the XP CD and commence setup, at some point it'll either report that it can't see a hard drive (in which case you do need some drivers) or it'll say 'Searching for previous installations' and show the vista installation (I presume, it would if it were an XP install) and show the hard drive, at which point delete the partition & do a fresh install (having ensured you've got all the motherboard drivers off the net first as someone else suggested).
You can most of the above without upsetting the existing install, just don't go past the bit where it detects the drive/partition/previous install.
Try it & see is the simple way.
Boot from the XP CD and commence setup, at some point it'll either report that it can't see a hard drive (in which case you do need some drivers) or it'll say 'Searching for previous installations' and show the vista installation (I presume, it would if it were an XP install) and show the hard drive, at which point delete the partition & do a fresh install (having ensured you've got all the motherboard drivers off the net first as someone else suggested).
You can most of the above without upsetting the existing install, just don't go past the bit where it detects the drive/partition/previous install.
If you have a machine with a SATA drive and you install XP, you will invariably get the message "Press F6 if you need to install a third party SCSI or RAID driver" early on in the install.
At that point, XP is looking for you to put a floppy with the drivers in and press F6. If you don't, the installation will fail and you're back to square one.
A further complication is that XP only recognises a few types of floppy drive so if like me you find an external USB floppy and hope that will work, it may not.
If you don't have the correct floppy drive in your machine you're stuffed as you can't skip this stage and there's no other way to get around it.
I tried a lot of workarounds to no avail, so I can say from experience that the nLite way is the best. It also allows you to copy other drivers you may need for the install onto one disc which you can then use in the future if you need to do a reinstall or install on several similar machines.
This took quite a bit of researching (more than my usual 10 minutes!) as it isn't that obvious what the problem is when you first come across it. Toshiba support didn't come up with an answer when I originally rang them about it, even though they have now started to support XP 'downgrades' on their existing Vista-based laptops.
At that point, XP is looking for you to put a floppy with the drivers in and press F6. If you don't, the installation will fail and you're back to square one.
A further complication is that XP only recognises a few types of floppy drive so if like me you find an external USB floppy and hope that will work, it may not.
If you don't have the correct floppy drive in your machine you're stuffed as you can't skip this stage and there's no other way to get around it.
I tried a lot of workarounds to no avail, so I can say from experience that the nLite way is the best. It also allows you to copy other drivers you may need for the install onto one disc which you can then use in the future if you need to do a reinstall or install on several similar machines.
This took quite a bit of researching (more than my usual 10 minutes!) as it isn't that obvious what the problem is when you first come across it. Toshiba support didn't come up with an answer when I originally rang them about it, even though they have now started to support XP 'downgrades' on their existing Vista-based laptops.
okgo said:
Never needed to install SATA drivers on an xp machine. Have done probably 500 installs on the system too.
Unless there is an error with the board or drive you will be fine
That's probably because the XP machines already have the drivers pre-installed or included with the OEM disc.Unless there is an error with the board or drive you will be fine
If you try installing XP over an existing Vista install you will probably get this problem because the drivers are all different.
As an aside, I've recently bought Toshiba and HP PC's, which were Vista only a few months ago, but strangely they are now offered with XP as an option. Could that be because a lot of customers were unhappy being forced to use Vista?
So an update and thanks for the replies. The windows setup starts ok but then ends up unable to find the hard disc. Borrowed an external usb floppy drive from a neighbour and looaded the SATA drivers on a floppy drive. Unfortunately the floppy drive is not seen by windows setup so back to square one. I'll try over the weekend to install xp on my PC and then clone the partition on the laptop SATA drive. Hope it works but suspect it will be tougher than it sounds.
simba1 said:
So an update and thanks for the replies. The windows setup starts ok but then ends up unable to find the hard disc. Borrowed an external usb floppy drive from a neighbour and looaded the SATA drivers on a floppy drive. Unfortunately the floppy drive is not seen by windows setup so back to square one. I'll try over the weekend to install xp on my PC and then clone the partition on the laptop SATA drive. Hope it works but suspect it will be tougher than it sounds.
Simba, this is exactly what I have described above and what happened to me.Have you had a look at the link I posted?
This will work, believe me!
simba1 said:
So an update and thanks for the replies. The windows setup starts ok but then ends up unable to find the hard disc. Borrowed an external usb floppy drive from a neighbour and looaded the SATA drivers on a floppy drive. Unfortunately the floppy drive is not seen by windows setup so back to square one. I'll try over the weekend to install xp on my PC and then clone the partition on the laptop SATA drive. Hope it works but suspect it will be tougher than it sounds.
Make sure that the right files are in the root of the floppy disk - theres usually a few subfolders in a downloaded drivers package. Pick the one suitable for XP, and with the file oemsetup.inf in it and put this folder in the root of the floppy so that oemsetup.inf isn't in any subfolder.
Floppy must be connected before you turn the machine on.
Edited by buggalugs on Tuesday 27th May 14:46
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