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Windows Vista Issue

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4 replies

by phocal

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I bought a new system that already had Windows Vista Premium Home edition installed. It has a 32GB SATA hard drive. I need to have this system run XP because of some industry specific software. I cannot reformat the hard drive. I bought a new SATA hard drive and tried to install XP on it, but still could not. It seems to have something to do with the BIOS on the motherboard not recognizing XP. Any ideas?

4 replies

by phocal

Sorry it is a 320GB hard drive, not a 32GB hard drive.

by oh smeg

And needs additional Drivers installed. At this point you need to press the [b]F6[/b] key on the first Windows Blue Screen as soon as it appears to install the SATA Drivers.

What you are better off doing first is to reinsert the Vista HDD and get a copy of Belarc Adviser from here

http://tinyurl.com/5w6o

Load that onto the Vista OS and run the application to get a list and possible download site of the required Drivers. When you download the drivers only pickup the XP ones.

Col

by chad.jackson

Windows XP will install fine will SATA drives. However, it will not work with AHCI operations without special drivers perhaps.

AHCI is the default integrated SATA HD controller. To get XP to install you might want to go into Bios (f2 usually at boot time) and then find SATA Operation and change it from AHCI to ATA. For you to be able to change this, you may need to disable the flash cache module which also may be a field in the BIOS. XP install should now recognize your drive.

Chad

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