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XP Not recognizing my hard drive for Install...

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by drnoise2

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and I'm pretty sure I know why. I have an Alienware laptop I bought back in February which came with Vista. Vista is horrid so I want to switch back to XP. My hard drive is RAID, and it shows it has SATA support, but I know nothing about SATA to say it's a SATA hard drive.

I think I need to load drivers (via the F6 menu) but this requires a floppy disc drive, which I don't have access to. I'm not entirely sure this is the answer to having the hard drive be recognized, but if it is...I'm not sure exactly how to get around it.

Just looking for any answers or suggestions so I can get this horrible operating system off and get XP Pro on here.

Cheers,
Bill

2 replies

by thechas

You need to determine which SATA controller is in your notebook, and download the XP driver for it.

The specification sheet for your notebook should tell you what SATA controller the notebook is using. It may even be built into the chip-set.

Once you identify the device, you should be able to download a reference driver from the device manufacture.

Drivers are often in .ZIP archives or .exe self extracting archives. If an archive, you will need to extract the files before you can use them.

If the file is too large for a floppy, just burn it to a CD-R disk and swap disks when prompted for the driver.

Chas

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