Vista to XP (Again)

Q

quirkygord69

New Member
First of all i'll apologise based on the fact that this question must have been asked over a dozen times. I have a HP notebook that came with Vista pre-installed. I use quite abit of Vsti and sequencers and the majority of it just hates Vista. Im currently attempting to switch back to XP Pro SP2 but when i boot from cd and the windows xp setup screen appears, it suddenly cannot find my hard drive so i cant repair the installation or setup a new one :-s then when i then press f3 to quit the xp setup, the notebook finds the hard drive with no problems and loads Vista. Any suggestions before I decapitate Bill Gates with it?

Addendum:

PS: Bring back the days of a 3.5inch floppy boot disc and a win 98 cd
 
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The XP Disc doesnt recognize the hard drive cause it is most likely a SATA Drive. So the thing you have to do is get the drivers for your drive HP. Then put them on a flash drive to use the F6 to isntall 3rd party drivers during the XP install.

Either that or use nlite to slipstream the drivers right into the install.
 
You may be able to go in your BIOS and look for a setting called "Native SATA" and disable it to work around this issue - otherwise, you'll have to do it the long way as Mak explained.
 
In my BIOS the setting was SATA IDE. That allowed things like Linux and other OS's to see my SATA drives easily.
 
Do you have any idea if there's a performance hit by enabling that? Only person I know with that feature on their laptop has no idea if it lowers their performance....

I know the advice is:
  1. Disable Native SATA or enable SATA IDE
  2. Install Windows
  3. Install the drivers in Windows
  4. Undo step 1
 
Well with me enabling the SATA IDE it allows me to isntall Linux, OS X. I have not gone back since cause i have not seen a performance hit at all. It runs exactly the same. Which is why i have left it alone. Some manufacturers like Dell do this to prevent you from installing other OS's.
 
Old thread, I know :smile:

But anyway, there are performance benefits to using AHCI over "Native SATA," namely you get higher bandwidth, take advantage of Native Command Queuing (which you pay extra to get drives that support it), and all-around better performance.

My "guide" in post #5 is missing a step, correct instructions:
  1. Disable Native SATA or enable SATA IDE
  2. Install Windows
  3. Install the drivers in Windows
  4. Enable MSAHCI service.
  5. Undo step 1
If you skip #4, it won't boot. MS claims you'd get a BSOD, but I received a standard bootloader error telling me the OS was not found.
 
Honestly since switching from ACHI to ISE i have not noticed any perofrmance gain at all. In Vista and XP.
 
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