fed up of vista want to reinstall xp but cant??

hobo28

The issue you have is almost certainly because you have a SATA hard drive and XP installation disks don't have the right drivers.

When you bought the PC you should have been given a recovery disk which should restore the PC to original condition.

Otherwise its a bit of a nightmare. I had to do this recently for a friends laptop. Does your PC have a floppy disk drive? That would make life much much easier. What you will need is to download the SATA driver to a floppy and when you are booting from the CD, press F6 at the start so it will prompt you for the floppy.

If you post the model of your PC or motherboard, I'm sure someone here can find the driver for you and link it.

Hope that helps.

jac1_3

If you aren't sure what motherboard you have use CPU-Z to find the make/model:

http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php

Does sound like you need the controller drivers but might be a little problematic getting them on the machine without a floppy drive. Some USB memory sticks emulate a floppy drive which would solve your problem (depending on the mobo)...

Hermann

One way to proceed if you have no floppy but can find the drivers is to create a 'slipstream' install.
Basically you create a bootable disc that includes the drivers and XP, it all works straight through then.

For info on how to create a 'slipstream' disc see the following site ....
http://weblogs.asp.net/jkey/archive/2005/08/28/423901.aspx

futuresbright

Thanks for all you replies :A

I`m all sorted now,all i did was go into the bios and enable the sata connection on the motherboard,boot from cd and my hard drive was detected.

simple!! :T (thanks tim if you are reading this!!!)

Thanks again.

Hermann

futuresbright wrote: »

Thanks for all you replies :A

I`m all sorted now,all i did was go into the bios and enable the sata connection on the motherboard,boot from cd and my hard drive was detected.

simple!! :T (thanks tim if you are reading this!!!)

Thanks again.

Great you got going.

I didn't mention the bios as I thought you'd had vista running with this hard drive/motherboard which should have meant the bios was already sata enabled. Never mind you got there in the end.

Little_John

Looks like you found it all by your self.

I will clear up a few peices of info posted in this
Vista doesnt make it imposible to install XP after vista. Downgrade rights allow you to install XP on vista machines.

No need to get drivers, for most driver controlers, XP has drivers for most, I use scsi drives and don't even need to use a driver disk duing the setup process of windows XP win2k maybe but not XP. Unfortunalty raid controlers are more varied so it isnt possible for microsoft to add all the drivers for them SATA are very much standard in comparison only a few different drivers so they built them in to XP.

Anyway altering the configuration of the controler in the bios from raid to standard SATA means that windows install has drivers so the drive is detected during setup.

Appologies for not being arround, I had an office up here to connect to an office in London via VPN today and it took a few hours to reconfigure all the workstations and printers as they needed an alternative IP range.

busterboy48

futuresbright wrote: »

Thanks for all you replies :A

I`m all sorted now,all i did was go into the bios and enable the sata connection on the motherboard,boot from cd and my hard drive was detected.

simple!! :T (thanks tim if you are reading this!!!)

Thanks again.

Told you to ring me.. now look at all this...:rolleyes: