Help installing dual booting XP on Vista machine

S

Spider

Member
Here's the deal. I just got a new gateway C-140XL tablet with vista and a 250GB SATA Hard drive. I had a little trouble getting XP installed at first because the XP disk I have does not recognize my SATA HD. So I used this nice little program called nlite to add SP2 and a bunch of Drivers from gateways website to my install CD and burned a new one. Now I have XP installed, but when the system starts I have absolutely no connection to the internet to download updates. I put in a CD with all the system drivers that I got from Gateways website and tried to install the drivers this way, but when I do I get an error saying the windows installer failed. Has anyone seen this before or have any idea what I can do here? Thanks
 
Hi Spider, welcome to NST.

Unfortunately, that "nice little program" you used is known to cause huge headaches - most likely it either incorrectly added the network driver or broke something in the networking components of Windows XP.

If you open the Device Manager, do you see a network adapter listed there? Or is there a yellow exclamation mark over any of the devices?
 
I can see the NIC card, but I there are some yellow question marks too. My biggest problem (I think) is that I can't get anything to install, even drivers. I could live without network on the XP partition, cause really I just want it to run some of the crazy programs I've got that won't run on Vista. Thanks for the help.
 
Well if you can not even get things to install then there is something wrong with the disc made with nlite. Use Autostreamer and see if that produces the same results.
 
OK, I tried AutoStreamer, it doesn't seam to recognize the XP SP2 that I downloaded from microsofts website. The other problem with AutoStreamer is it doesn't give me a way to slipstream the SATA drivers for this system. That was the real reason I even started looking at slipstreaming. Thanks for the help.
 
Did you do what was suggested in that thread? I know Eric gave a site to check for driver packs and that.
 
I've tried using Autostreamer to slipstream the XP SP2 and it keeps telling me that I haven't selected a valid service pack file. I'm just selecting the SP2.exe that I downloaded from MS. Do I need to do something different?
 
First, Thank you for all your help.
Ok, I was just trying the downloaded exe. I've extracted that to a folder, but I'm not sure what file I need to select from Autostreamer's browse function to select SP2. I've tried a number of the exe files that were extracted to the folder, but I keep getting the same error message
"The file you've specified is not a valid Microsoft Service Pack. Check the path and file. If you continue to get this message your file may be corrupt."

If i just try to point it to the whole file of extracted data from SP2.exe I get the error
"You haven't selected a valid Service Pack file! If you want to skip this, and just create a CD image, click 'Yes'. Otherwise, click 'No' to return and specify a valid Service Pack File."
 
Spider i will contact Eric and see if he knows a solution to this issue. I will get back to you ASAP. Maybe till then follow Guru's advice?
 
ok, it seams like when I slipstream SP2 with nlite or slipstreamer it may be working, and by working I mean I can boot from the DVD I make. When I try to slipstream the drivers using AutoStreamer I can Not boot from the DVD. This is just frustrating, as I don't even really care about SP2 ( I think). I really just want the original disk to be able to see my SATA hard drive. I've probably wasted about 15 DVD's now trying different combinations of slipstreaming programs, when all I think I really need is to integrate the SATA drivers. I really appreciate your help and continuous feedback. Any easy way to just add my SATA drivers?
 
You should be able to just add them but that does not guarantee that the disc will work. SATA drivers are newer technology and there is no way to say for sure if they will work with SP1 of XP. That was out before SATA drives.

Maybe you ahve the wrong drivers? Either that or see if you can get a SP2 disc and try it?
 
Side Tip: Assure that you are using a version of the drivers designed for XP if Gateway offers them seeing how the tablet orginally had Vista on it. From experience, some of these newer systems don't have XP compatiable drivers cause they were built to support Vista on forward.
 
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