Help reinstalling XP over Vista

Cbrown1986 · Post by **Cbrown1986** » Sun Apr 29, 2007 8:16 pm

Hello,

My laptop is running terrible with Vista on it.

I put my original XP home cd on it and it boots up on it but then tells me that it cant find a hard drive...?

Can anyone help me here please?

Cheers!!

FTO338 · Post by **FTO338** » Sun Apr 29, 2007 9:05 pm

Vista is not maximise for laptop yet, which mean it will kill your battery time and everything runs like crap.

Which brand of laptop you using? What sort of XP Disc you using? As in recovery or proper full version?

oodLes · Post by **oodLes** » Sun Apr 29, 2007 9:17 pm

Get a local tech friend to help dude, that's a VERY odd problem and nothing the forum here will be able to help with. :\

Cbrown1986 · Post by **Cbrown1986** » Sun Apr 29, 2007 10:09 pm

It's a HP and installing Vista stuffed up the recovery drive..

It's an original XP home cd, the whole thing, not an upgrade one..

kid_dynamite · Post by **kid_dynamite** » Sun Apr 29, 2007 10:11 pm

oodLes wrote:Get a local tech friend to help dude, that's a VERY odd problem and nothing the forum here will be able to help with. :\

Actually it's pretty common at the moment with all the ppl who are choosing to replace Vista with XP

You most likely need drivers for your hard drive controller.

They would have been removed when you formatted, and as a consequence it's unable to recognise your hard drive.

//edit: missed your last post whilst I was typing. On the HP website go into the Software & Driver downloads section, and the one you need should look like: "Intel SATA AHCI Controller Driver" or something like that.

FTO338 · Post by **FTO338** » Sun Apr 29, 2007 10:28 pm

kid_dynamite wrote:
oodLes wrote:Get a local tech friend to help dude, that's a VERY odd problem and nothing the forum here will be able to help with. :\
Actually it's pretty common at the moment with all the ppl who are choosing to replace Vista with XP

I agree, being working for a vendor, we get lots of requests from the distribution's level stated that their resellers is requesting either a "down grade" or "roll back" disc.

Unfortunately the offical word from Microsoft is, it can't be done (as usual). If its a full proper XP disc and not part of the so call "full recovery version" then like kid_dynamite said, go to the vendor website and download the driver and things should be ok.

To me it seems to be pretty stupid that lots of vendor now use hard drive image as recovery, even thought itâ€™s on a partition section, but if the hard drive die, how you going to access it? And if you don't have internet access, you really stuck with no drivers.

Cbrown1986 · Post by **Cbrown1986** » Sun Apr 29, 2007 10:37 pm

ok, so I download that driver then restart with the xp cd in and she'll be right to go?

umm · Post by **umm** » Sun Apr 29, 2007 10:59 pm

Yeah but you'll probably need a whole lot of other drivers too. right click on my computer and go into properties...click the hardware tab then device manager. it will show a yellow question mark next to all the things that need drivers.

i done the vista to xp conversion to my girlfriends laptop and had to download about 10 drivers

Dr_Jones · Post by **Dr_Jones** » Sun Apr 29, 2007 11:10 pm

What model HP is it? The recovery partition is crap I agree but the it saves them a few bucks and you make your own discs with revovery stuff on them. Then bye bye partition.

oodLes · Post by **oodLes** » Mon Apr 30, 2007 2:42 am

Oh so he only has a recovery disc. Bad luck to you bud.

This thread makes no sense by the way.