[LichLord]

I have just recently bought a laptop installed with windows vista. I'm not saying vista is bad or anything, but I'd rather just go back to xp due to familarity and reliability.

The problem is, when I boot from the cd, xp can't find the hard drive. This is where I'm stuck.

I have a compaq presario c500, with a gig of ram, 80 gigs of hard drive space, and a 1.73 processor.

I don't want to dual boot.

[ICONIC]

ya this is a familiar problem just look it up google and there are tons of tutorials that tell you how to partion your hdd and install xp and uninstall vista

[LichLord]

Me searching google lead me to this site... lol.

[ICONIC]

just keep looking

[LichLord]

I still can't find it.

[gsebs]

But I am trying to stay with the dual boot, I think you just need to format your hard drive and then stick in the install disk which will load up XP try the site howtodothings I am just not game enough to format my hard drive and rely on a disk that I can't prove that works. However it works fine on my xp computer just haveing problems on vista one.

[wacky.banana]

Lichlord,

You need to ensure that your XP disk is a full copy, not one of these recovery disks.

If you have a full copy, or can access one, then the next thing to determine is if you are running a SATA drive on your machine. If yes then you need to go into the bios and change the settings to (I think) auto detect. Search around on here for a more detailed answer to this point.

Before you start to insall XP over Vista by reformatting and reinstalling XP from scratch (will destroy all your data on your drive so take backups of your data files first) go find the SATA drivers and copy them to a floppy disk.

When installing XP press the F6 button when requested and be ready to install the SATA drivers off the floppy into the XP install when required.

This is the general direction in which you need to go. Read a few more threads on here to clarify a couple of details and you are ready to go.

Good luck.

WB

PS - Have a look at this thread as well; http://forums.techguy.org/windows-vi...a-home-xp.html

[Rich-M]

First of all you need to know there are drivers for XP for sound, ethernet etc, as many do not have that and without it XP will not help you. You can go to dell.com and do Support, Downloads and put in either the "service tag" # from side or bottom of pc and make sure there are drivers for XP.
The next hurdle with be sata drivers for XP so that setup can see the drive and those too must behad from the Dell site and loaded into setup tapping f6 when cued during setup which hopefully you can put on a cd.
The other route might be to contact dell and see if you can buy XP Restore disks which would have that driver on them for this model but what you are going to try to do will be a lot of work unless those are available and probably not worth the effort.