*Another Vista Failure* need XP back.

Hello All,

Well I have recently purchased Compaq Presario c506CA came with Vista home premium, and i refuse to continue on with this load of crap OS. Vista is nothing but a failure to me...so i decided to downgrade to XP. Unfortunetly I cant seem to get xp setup to recongnize my hardrive on the laptop. no hardrive detected to install xp ??

i can boot from the xp cd ..after i hit enter for the setup it gives me the error of not detecting harddrive. and the only option is F3 to exit

any help is appreciated! .. thanks in advance

 

go to ur BIOS and disable native support for SATA

cuz XP doesnt natively support SATA without the drivers, so this helps with that problem

 

thanks for the fast reply side
rebooting ......

 

oh boy, im in the same boat as you are jdmlude. Except I was trying to resize my partition to make room for Vista for a dual boot setup, i failed miserably.
I tried disabling native SATA support and still no luck. XP Setup disk wont recogonize any partitions on my harddrive. Windows XP wont boot now and just imediately goes into BSOD and restarts. My plan is using the Hiren Bootcd and get some picture files i foolishly didnt backup, and then use the included tools to wipe the HD clean.

Is there a way to "save" my current partition and get XP to boot correctly?

 

What exactly does disabling the SATA support in the BIOS do?

TIA

 

Did disabling SATa work?

 

It makes the SATA ports look like regular IDE ports, so that Windows XP can see them. Unlike Vista, XP doesn't have SATA drivers built-in. Since there is no floppy drive from which to load drivers from during XP setup, the only options are to disable native SATA support in the BIOS, or to try to create an XP install CD with those drivers integrated.

Hmm... there's a LOT of possibilities, some aren't too tough to fix, some are. If you can back up what you need and reformat/repartition your drive, it will likely be faster and easier. If you don't want to go that route, though, post back with more detail, what exactly you did, with what programs, and on what OS, etc. and maybe someone will have more advice for you (though it definitely sounds like you know what you're doing if you are using Hiren's Boot CD).

 

If Windows XP can still read a SATA hdd with SATA disabled, is there a need to enable SATA at all? Does enabling SATA provide any advantages?

TIA

 

HP Pavillion dv6000t
Intel c2d 1.86ghz
1.00 gb ram
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005

Well, I this is what I was doing when the problem happened:
-Using Norton Partition Magic v10 I was trying to make a new partition for Vista to install, But for some reason it would not create the parittion, my best guess is due to the Recovery partition.
-So I copied the recovery partition to an ext HD, and deleted it in my system HD.
-partition magic still was not able to create a new partition in my main HD for some reason I couldnt figure out.
-So I moved to resize my C:\ partition and partitionmagic prompted me to restart my system to be able to do this, so I went with it, and it was going fine until 31% where it got an error, specifically error 1552.
-System restarted, and has not been able to boot into Windows XP again.
-I tried disabling NAtive SATA support in the BIOS, still no luck
-I put in a Windows XP Pro cd to see if I could use t he repair console. When doing so, the setup said it did not detect any HD to install windows to.
-Since then I've been using ultimate bootcd and Hiren to try to desparately recover some photos of my newborn nephew that i foolishly forgot to backup before this whole mess.
-So far I think the Winternals recover utitlity is able to extract my much needed files.
-But back to my question, is there any way to recover the Windows XP install?
If not, will the recovery discs I burned through HP be able to do the trick? Cus I still want to go forward and make a dual boot of Vista and XP.

 

Not really. On a RAID array or something there would likely be a difference, but for a single notebook drive, I don't think there's any real advantage.

Okay, hmmm... thankfully you recovered the pics! Once that's all done, I would just go ahead and use your resotre DVDs to get the system back to its original condition. Then, install Partition Magic again. Run "chkdsk c: /f" at a command prompt before adjusting the partition size with Partition Magic to correct any file system problems that cause Partition Magic to fail and hose your system. Then, run Partition Magic, shrink your XP partition and create the partition for Vista. It should work this time. Install Vista to the new partition and you'll be good to go.

 

thanks a bunch jadedraverla for your help and compassion!

 

To restore or install XP, the partition (if you're dual booting) or the drive needs to be FAT32. Not sure if that's true for Vista.

So if your partition was NTFS, you'll need to recreate it as FAT32, install XP, then convert back to NTFS.