sudden 'IRQL not less or equal' error and would not load XP. I disabled Native SATA support in BIOS and now it windows loads fine.

Hi,

this is going to be a long post, so please read on if you can help me out.

I have a HP pavilion dv6000 laptop, and it has windows xp on it.
one day suddenly while it was loading windows with the blue bar, it gave me an 'IRQL not less or equal' error and would not load windows.
Restarting windows or starting in safe mode did not help.

I finally removed the hard drive and put it in the second empty hard drive slot in my gateway fx 7805u, and backed up everything.

I put the hard drive back into the HP laptop, and I boot from windows CD to do a fresh clean install of windows.
But then it gave me the "Setup did not find any hard disk drives" during Windows XP Installation.

I looked into this on google and I found out that I should go into BIOS and disable the Native SATA support.
Note that I did all this so that I can do a fresh install of windows.
But after I disabled the native SATA support and rebooted the computer, it started to load windows perfectly fine!
and now it boots up like it used to!

what is this native sata support that I disabled? and why did my windows suddenly have problems with this?

 

Native sata support probably turns on native SATA features that aren't backwards compatible with IDE. Disabling it would be for compatibility purposes as the Setup program on XP cannot detect HD attached to Sata Controllers without outside drivers.

Hope that makes sense.

You should not run into any problems with Windows. You'll miss out on certain Sata only features, but IMO you won't suffer any substantial performance losses.