Am i screwed

ok i'm at work right now and was going to remove vista from my 6920 aspire to put on xp because i have vista. Thinking i wouldn't have a problem i simply used the Kill Disk program to format my drives. I put in my xp cd and it will not load because it says HDD not detected, I don't have a cd burner on my work computer but i do have a 4 Gb flash drive is there anything i can do to get it to load up windows xp, Been reading that there is something with XP not allowing install due to the laptop having SATA setup and xp won't work with that? Can anyone please help me. Hoping there is something i can do to maybe load the drivers from my flash drive then install the xp cd. Any help would be appreciated.

 

Kill disk ! did it offend you in some way lol

A retail XP install disk will not see the SATA disk if it is operating in AHCI mode. AHCI is long after XP's time

If your BIOS allows it you could set the disk controller to ATA mode. This suggestion will cause purists to get very excited about losing the 1.243562% performance improvement from NCQ . . but you may care less.

Note trying to move from ATA to AHCI after installation has been done but is regarded as risky and may result in a performance loss . . .

If your bios lacks that setting you need another harder approach. You need what are called F6 AHCI drivers for your controller - forgive me I dont know your laptop well enough to identify this device and you may need to get the 32 bit or 64 bit versions. You can use another PC to find and download these. Generally they include a exe file that formats and creates a F6 floppy disk with files on it like iaAhci.inf, iaAhci.cat, iaStor.inf, iaStor.cat, iastor.sys, and TxtSetup.oem.

XP will want to be shown these at the start of the install. At the first halt you press F6 to install other drivers before windows tried to see what hardware is there. Unfortunately XP (unlike vista) wants these drivers on the main windowsXP DVD or on a Floppy Disk. Maybe youhave a USB floppy (?1?)
There is a slim chance you motherboard may however present a USB stick for selection in which case you are good. (if 'boot from USB' is a bios option the odds are good)
Failing this The 'easiest approach' is to 'slipstream' AHCI drivers onto a XPSP3 image (google nlite) as you then have a clean install straight to SP3. Not too hard if you have another PC and a DVD burner to hand.

 

I only have the options of changing it to AHCI and IDE mode. should i use IDE mode?

 

I used IDE mode and it started going to the install process asked which partition i wanted to put it on had a 15 gig and a 140 gig i believe, chose the smaller one first then it told me it couldn't find it. so i chose the larger one, it asked if i wanted to do a quick or full format i chose full and its been sitting at 0% for about 10 minutes..... hmmm

 

Well it was never going to fit in 15GB - I guess that is a recovery partition and may be a non standard format. How did it survive the 'format' you said you did . . I guess you formatted the partitions but left them there. cleaning the disk under diskpart or similar would have been better but you can delete this 15GB partition later . .

The large partition is ok for your install , but Full format will write to every sector on the disk while Quick just tears up the existing index and moves on swiftly.

If your disk light is still flickering it is just making a long job of a long job.

You could abandon it and say Quick this time

 

Just hoping your format finished