[Raphial]

I saw some past threads here on this sight, but none of them nailed a good enough answer for me, so here I am.

My problem is that I have a Toshiba laptop with Windows Vista on it, but I want to install Windows XP "over it" because I cannot use any of my previous programs or media on Vista.

How do I reformat the hard drive in this Toshiba laptop to delete Vista and install XP Pro, because when I boot from my new Windows XP Pro CD, it states in the middle of the setup "Cannot find hard disk."

Any suggestions?

[Mystical28]

Hello,

Try this link, it should be simple to partition your drive and install Windows XP as long as you have the software. I have a Mac and partitioned mine with Vista because I couldn't find XP software. Anyhow I used a program called BootCamp which is for Apple but the following link should work with your laptop or any other non-mac computers. I browsed the site and it is easy to understand and it gives you step by step instructions, pictures included. Hope this helps....

http://www.howtogeek.com/forum/topic...vista-computer

Once you pull the website, click on the link under Overview and that should be all you need.

Let me know. Misty

[Elvandil]

Do you have a SATA drive? What you did should work for installing XP, but the message may mean that you need to load a SATA driver at the F6 prompt in order for setup to see the hard drive.

[reh2k]

Originally Posted by Raphial

I saw some past threads here on this sight, but none of them nailed a good enough answer for me, so here I am.

My problem is that I have a Toshiba laptop with Windows Vista on it, but I want to install Windows XP "over it" because I cannot use any of my previous programs or media on Vista.

How do I reformat the hard drive in this Toshiba laptop to delete Vista and install XP Pro, because when I boot from my new Windows XP Pro CD, it states in the middle of the setup "Cannot find hard disk."

Any suggestions?

Can you give us your laptop model? As Elvandil said, you probably have SATA drives which do not support IDE setup in the BIOS.

To counter this you will need a floppy disk drive and floppy disk to load the drivers to. Then once the machine loads the first segment of the windows setup you will need to press f6 to load 3rd party raid or scsi drivers.

If we have your machine model etc, we may be able to source the files you require for you.

However, if you do not have a floppy drive and floppy disk, you will need to integrate the drivers in the XP install disk, which is a bit of a tricky process.