Installing XP Pro over Vista: No hard drive found?

I'm trying to fix a friends notebook.
I have a friend who's at Boeing has a problem that had the IT guy there stumped. He has Vista installed on his Toshiba Satellite A205 notebook and wants to reformat this notebook and go back to XP Pro. I realize that reformatting is the only way to go back to XP so I am prepared to do that.
I set my boot order to look at CDROM drives first and indeed it does. It boots up from the WinXP install CD but when I can only get as far as an error message telling me that there are no hard drives detected. I tried the straight up install, the repair from recovery console option, and neither work.

How can I FORCE this notebook to allow reformatting to occur when booting from the XP install CD. Is there a setting in BIOS (HD area) that I can change to make this work or what? Online research is saying something about HD type?

It boots up from the WinXP install CD, (windows setup) loads the files/drivers etc, but when I get to "Welcome to setup" it gives me three choices,
* Setup Windows XP
* Repair/Windows Recovery Console
* Quit

I select Setup Windows XP then can only get as far as an error message telling me "Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed on your computer".
Setup cannot continue...

I checked in BIOS and there is a HD dectected:
BIOS in Main and it says:
Hard Disk Drive: ST9250827AS-(S1)

 

you need sata drivers

 

I think you also need to change the HDD (I think it's called sata xyz or something) on the bios to compatibility mode or something like that. Sorry but I'm rusty in that area.


EDIT:

I remember you boot into the bios, then to config, then hdd sata, then you choose either Compatibilty or AHCSI or something like that. Check whatever it's on now, try the other. If it doesn't work, you got nothing to loose.

Good luck

 

Please explain? and how to do that?

 

I don't see that... only Main-Advance-Display-Security-Boot-Exit at the top and nowhere can I find how to change the HD type?

 

i donno the exact details of the toshiba bios however this is what hasto be done

in bios go to SATA controller and change it from AHCI to SATA mode

 

Hi.

when you install xp, it starts copying drivers and it askers you if you want to load any other drivers to press a key, now my old desktop had a adaptec sata pci card and would have to insert the floppy disk so that xp could get the drivers.

It sound like you just need to get the sata drivers, or do a slipstream xp disk.

Regards

John.

 

no need of SATA drivers if u disable AHCI and set the controller to do SATA emulation. windows will detect the HDD without any problem. i recommend you to browse thru the bios options and find this out if you are not certain where to go

 

OK, here is what I'm doing now. I've found my Seagate Disc Utility CD and created a bootable disc and then put that in the Toshiba notebook and booted from that. Now it is letting me Wipe the disc. Looks like this is going to take a while. I will post when done.

BTW, I found the Toshiba VISTA recovery CD in the notebook case, so I can use that too.

 

this is not infact changing the hard drive type but changing how the controller accesses the hard drive. so it will be under the advanced options.

 

I do not see that in BIOS in advance area?

 

Anymore ideas?