[maggotdrowner]

Hi, I'm trying to upgrade my daughters laptop to XP but keep hitting a brick wall, as it cannot see the HDD when trying to install...The laptop has one of the vista's (are they all that bad??), but she prefers XP..Laptop is an ACER Extensa 5620Z, but they are not very helpful as it seems they just want to push Vista...
Someone did suggest it might need a 3rd party driver? to load before installing XP, but didn't say the driver for what..HDD, Motherboard, HDD controller...
Having bought a new XP disk, i'm dissapointed to see I cannot install straight over the top of this other NON user friendly O/S.
Thanks in advance

[Megabite]

At the start did you choose to install a fresh copy of XP .....\

You can try and format the drive......that will erase any data...so be sure you want to do it.

[a_danziger]

You undoubtedly have a SATA hardrive in your Vista machine. If you're knowledgable and know how to slipstream the SATA hard disk drivers into an XP install CD you can just do it that way, otherwise you'll need an external floppy drive (surely there isn't one of those in your new computer either). The SATA drivers have to be loaded before Windows can see the hard drive during a Windows installation. XP came out before SATA hard drives so the drivers aren't on an original XP install CD.

Now there's one big caveat to this, there's only a few floppy drives that meet an old IBM spec that will work to do this. I use an IBM USB Portable Diskette Drive, part number 19308803-19. Also try searching for ASM P/N 13N6752 and FRU P/N 05K9283. Remember, any old USB floppy drive won't work, it has to be one supported by MS during the install and the list is very limited and you're not likely to find one at your local CompUSA or MircoCenter. I found mine online doing a google search.

And don't think you can just put the drivers onto a USB thumb drive, that doesn't work either. This is an old holdout installation routine of MS from days gone by. Why they haven't changed it is beyond me but this is the way it is. For some reason, there aren't a lot of people out there that know this but short of slipstreaming the SATA drivers onto your XP install disk, I believe this is the only other way to downgrade a Vista notebook with a SATA hardrive to XP.

And yes, by all means fdisk your hard drive to get rid of any remnants of Vista before you begin to avoid the error that you're trying to install an older operating system onto a disk with a newer one. To use a floppy to install the drivers, start the XP install on a clean newly partitioned drive. When the installation says to press F6 to install RAID drivers press F6 and install your SATA drivers from the USB connected floppy drive.

Hope this information helps.

[aka Brett]

I did some basic hd test with the sata driver installed and without it.
the results were so close that it didnt matter.
so therefore it is practical to go ahead and change the settings in bios to ide so xp will pick up the drive

[a_danziger]

Never tried it but I don't think that'll work. I believe that the BIOS is going to autodetect and find the drive no matter what you select but it's Windows XP that's going to squawk. Without the correct drivers the hard drive is going to be invisible to XP during the beginning of the install.

[aka Brett]

It works i am on a dual boot with xp and w7 right now with a sata drive with bios set to ide
But i would try to talk the thread starter out of going to xp there are driver issues etc.
and vist really is stable..there is no reason to not use vista ubless you have old hardware

[aka Brett]

I also benched the read and writes under vista they were so close it is a tie.
the interface is much faster than the drive itself so it is like running a garden hose through a one foot pipe versus a 2 foot pipe ..makes little differance

[aka Brett]

Originally Posted by maggotdrowner

Hi, I'm trying to upgrade my daughters laptop to XP but keep hitting a brick wall, as it cannot see the HDD when trying to install...The laptop has one of the vista's (are they all that bad??), but she prefers XP..Laptop is an ACER Extensa 5620Z, but they are not very helpful as it seems they just want to push Vista...
Someone did suggest it might need a 3rd party driver? to load before installing XP, but didn't say the driver for what..HDD, Motherboard, HDD controller...
Having bought a new XP disk, i'm dissapointed to see I cannot install straight over the top of this other NON user friendly O/S.
Thanks in advance

going from vista to xp will also destroy your mbr making a future recovery through the recovery partition a very large nightmare.
There are the driver issues.
I from experiance went to put xp on an acer that was preloaded with vista
all drivers were located prior and saved to a stick.
after the install the wireless did not work the proper driver could not be located...additionally that wireless card could not be used in ubuntu without some major work.
much research needs to be done before choosing xp. The only reason to dump vista and go with xp is a dedicated gaming machine,

Vista is very stable and will run for weeks without a reboot...infact the longer it is up the better it runs...hence why sleep or hibernate is preferred over shutdown.
if your vista machine is slow then it need ram 2 gigs will make a nice machine and a gig is ok with the sidebar turned off an easy av and turing off un neededs in msconfig.

[maggotdrowner]

Hmm seems i sturred up a wasp nest....Why oh Why are things so complicated..All I wanted was to put a clean install of XP but to no avail..Looks like too many complications with drivers may arise for me to do this...I think my daughter will have to live with vista....whatever happened to freedom of choice....

Thanks for all the feed back and i'll think about this for a while..

[fairnooks]

Windows 7 is going to be far and away the preferred OS for laptops especially so maybe you can hang on til then and upgrade that way, or you don't have to think about it at all or live with Vista for now (potentially) if you have the option (which almost all do these days) to make restore DVDs (or have a Vista installation disc) so if XP doesn't work out (changing the BIOS to IDE mode is the good tip for being able to see the drive with XP), you can go right back to Vista with the restore discs.

Acer is fairly decent about providing XP drivers for thier products so I would definitely check thier support pages and if you don't find anything on the US pages, check out the European support pages. In fact I would check out the European ones first since I have the most luck there getting XP support for thier products.

As far as stability goes, I find almost no difference at all between XP and Vista, both run for months on end if allowed. The only difference I've found is that if a program hangs or messes up in XP, it often has to be terminated from the task manager whereas Vista is much more likely to just toss the program on the scrapheap without any consultation.

[sul2005tan]

If you have windows vista installation DVD, you can use nLite to integrate SATA driver with wndows vista DVD , I hope this help you.

this is good tutorial to make this way
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Insta...F6-47807.shtml

[a_danziger]

That's without a doubt the best article I've seen regarding using NLite to slipstream your drivers onto an XP install disk. Chances are someone else has already downgraded the same model notebook that you want to downgrade. Enough people who attempt this post the driver names on a public forum someplace that a good google search will almost always find them. In regards to the Gateway MX8711, a Vista machine, you can use the MX8710 drivers (an XP machine) found on the Gateway website.

[aka Brett]

Originally Posted by fairnooks

Windows 7 is going to be far and away the preferred OS for laptops especially so maybe you can hang on til then and upgrade that way, or you don't have to think about it at all or live with Vista for now (potentially) if you have the option (which almost all do these days) to make restore DVDs (or have a Vista installation disc) so if XP doesn't work out (changing the BIOS to IDE mode is the good tip for being able to see the drive with XP), you can go right back to Vista with the restore discs.

Acer is fairly decent about providing XP drivers for thier products so I would definitely check thier support pages and if you don't find anything on the US pages, check out the European support pages. In fact I would check out the European ones first since I have the most luck there getting XP support for thier products.

As far as stability goes, I find almost no difference at all between XP and Vista, both run for months on end if allowed. The only difference I've found is that if a program hangs or messes up in XP, it often has to be terminated from the task manager whereas Vista is much more likely to just toss the program on the scrapheap without any consultation.

The biggest problem with going from vista to xp is the damage to the mbr so that the client cant use the recovery partition in the future when they decide to go back to vista,
Sure one can always install with the disks....if they can be found...if there is not an error on one.
Vista has been out long enough and 7 will be here in a year or less, a person has to get used to the new interface sooner or later.
I think the issue here first should be why the person is unhappy with vista and see if that can be taken care of,if not then then the xp route.
As far as stability goes vista wins as xp willmneed a reboot from time to time to get its speed back up while vista improves the longer it is up and handles a misbehaving program better

[aka Brett]

Originally Posted by maggotdrowner

Hmm seems i sturred up a wasp nest....Why oh Why are things so complicated..All I wanted was to put a clean install of XP but to no avail..Looks like too many complications with drivers may arise for me to do this...I think my daughter will have to live with vista....whatever happened to freedom of choice....

Thanks for all the feed back and i'll think about this for a while..

We live to get stung. The main thing is that all the drivers are located,and with that there is also the small possibilty that there can be an inaccuracy with the xp drivers listed.I know it happened to me.
Although the majority of the models in question had used the same wireless card this madel had a differant one...2 days of googleing was done without success.
How much ram does the machine have? This is usually the differance between liking and hating vista