New Hard Drive install question

Hey everybody , I have a question about installing a new hard drive. I recently got a dv9000t with Vista on it, and I wanted to know how to put a new hard drive in it with xp. Would I simply take out the current hard drive ane put the new drive in, format it and load xp or are there other steps/precautions I would have to do. I read on another post that you can't install xp on a sata drive without disabling sata support in the bios?
P.S. I haven't even started the computer yet so would it be bad to take the original hard drive out without starting it up and loading vista first, or should I load Vista get everything working, and then take it out and put the new hard drive in format, and load xp. Any help would be immensley appreciated.

 

basically you just do the steps you have said. Just take caution, desstatic yourself, and that should be it.

 

Cool thanks for the advice! 13 seconds until destatication...... lol.

 

Greetings,

Do you mean to dual boot Vista and XP?

The 9000 series supports two Hard drives. I will probably dual boot both on my DV8408, Vista on HD0 and XP on HD1. When I did the Vista betas and RC1 the install for Vista automatically saw XP and went ahead and did a dual boot. Worked great. Hope the OEM version that I get from HP on the Express Upgrade works the same.

On the other hand you should be able to hit <ESC> at post and tell it to boot off the XP or Vista disk. That would require you to modify the boot.ini of the XP disk, if it is in HD1.


One other thing. You have to disable native sata support, in the bios, or XP won't see the disk.

 

Sorry for the double post here, but if you have not booted that new laptop yet do so first, before you do anything and burn your recovery disks, unless they came with your machine!

 

I forgot that they supported dual drives. In that case I would definately want to dual boot xp and vista. I still have to buy another hard drive. Would I have to enable/disable sata support to go back and forth from xp to Vista? Thanks for the info lamegaptop.

 

eoneel,

You only need to disable sata in bios for the XP install. Then turn it back on, once XP is installed. I'm not sure if XP can handle setting up a dual boot. Usually one must install the older os first. If you have a Vista CD you could do a clean install of XP then a clean install of vista.

 

Even though this has been said about a thousand times by now, i'll mention it again...

If you're thinking of buying a new hard drive just to have xp and vista, you dont need 2 hard drives for that. You just need to get yourself a 3rd party application like partition magic or gparted (free), creat a 2nd partition and install XP on that partition. When you start your computer you will be taken to a boot screen that asks you if you want to load vista or xp.
its that easy.