Installing new operating system on Gateway m-7301u

Hello. I'm trying to instal Windows XP on my Gateway M-series laptop and I've been running into some problems, that I've been informed can be fixed from my BIOS menu. However, I cannot find the information to tell me what options I need to change.

A little background: This laptop has been giving my family trouble for the last 3 years, in that it will connect to the network and receive pings off of websites, but no browser would pull the website up. I just ran DBAN software on my laptop to erase and reformat my hard drive, but when I boot from my OS disk, I still receive this error:

A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.

If this is the first time you've seen this stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again, follow these steps:

Check for viruses on your computer. Remove any newly installed hard drives or hard disk controllers. Check your hard drive to make sure it is properly configured and terminated. Run CHKDSK /F to check for hard drive corruption, and then restart your computer.

Technical information:

*** STOP: 0x0000007B (0xF78D2524, 0xC0000034, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)

What am I doing wrong?

 

Sorry to hear the bad news. I was doing the same thing fixing a friends m-7301u and sadly found out the notebook has a SATA (Serial ATA) hard drive. XP installs on IDE drives although it can recognize some SATA (not this one). You can access the notebook BIOS by pressing F2 when the computer starts, however this particular BIOS does not allow you to set an IDE or AHCI drive configuration (at least that I could see) that XP will recognize. I made a XP bootdisk with "PE Builder" Bart's Preinstalled Environment (BartPE) bootable live windows CD/DVD, but it failed, same error. Currently I am searching for a solution but I think we are both stuck with Vista because this SATA hard drive cannot be seen by XP and you can't put drivers on it to fix the issue. I'm almost sure. I'll be positive before to long! What a bummer 'cause Vista is awful. I'm glad it's not my machine. If I get a solution I'll be sure to post is here.

 

Use nLite software to add the SATA drivers to the installation disc. With your Windows XP disc copy all the contents and temporarily store it on your hard drive. Grab the SATA AHCI driver for your model, I think its the Intel Matrix Storage driver but double check from your Vista Device Manager. Then use the nLite software to integrate the SATA drivers to the copied Windows XP files and burn the contents on to a blank CD.

With the right SATA drivers it should recognise your hard drive and be good to go installing XP on it. But I would advise checking to see if the other drivers such as your network card, graphics and audio drivers are XP compatible as well before proceeding.

 

Hey there PatchySan:
Your idea looks promising. I down loaded nLite and it looks straightforward. We have the "Intel GL40 chipset" so the Intel Matrix Storage link looks like it has the drivers. If the nLite software by passes the "F6" option on loading the XP OS it should work. I haven't been able to finish the job yet but I'll post the results. Thanks Geo