Downgrading from Vista to XP

[thesouthazn]

Hi,

I bought a Compaq C762NR Laptop and it came pre-installed with Vista. I want to reboot it wish XP.

After putting the XP cd in, a screen eventually comes up saying that "Setup did not find any hard disk drives", and prompts me to quit setup. I googled this problem, and found out that the problem lies with the SATA HDD on laptops.

So I went into the bios, disabled SATA, and tried to reboot xp again, and this time no screen came up. and the reboot process looks normal, but most sites (like this one) recommend downloading the SATA driver from the manufacturer's website, and pressing F6 during the xp setup where it asks "install a third party scsi or raid driver", then install the driver using a floppy.

Unfortunately, neither does my laptop have a floppy drive, and I cannot find any sata drivers at my manufacturer's website... Actually there's only one driver listed there and its a storage driver, which brings more worries later.

Anyway, if I disable SATA from the bios and boot xp onto the laptop, will my computer still be able to enable SATA? Will the computer slow down if I keep SATA off?

Thanks in advance!

 

[carnageX]

You just may not to get to use the extra SATA perks, is all I believe. Such as hotswapping, which is the main thing that SATA is capable of.

You'd have to get the drivers for SATA from the motherboard manufacturer's site (if possible) since HP doesn't carry it. Not sure if you'll be able to find the driver (or board) on the manufacturer's site anyway, since HP usually gets OEM boards specific for them.

And to install the drivers, if you get them, you should be able to use a flash drive, as I'm sure your laptop supports booting off of USB.

 

[KSoD]

Hello,

You can not disable SATA in the BIOS and still use the hard drive. The Drive is SATA and disabling it will dsable the Drive. You have to contact HP and see if they have any SATA Drivers that you can use to slipstream into your XP install.

http://www.techist.com/forums/f9/how-keep-winxp-really-fast-stable-156582/

The Process is fully described in that post by EricB.

Cheers,
Mak

 

[agentphish]

I have posted complete instructions and all needed files to complete an XP downgrade on this machine.

Good luck

Compaq C762NR Vista to XP Conversion