Vaio VGN-NR160E XP Driver Set

My company just picked up 3 of these laptops knowing full-well that they'd come with Vista Home. Didn't figure it'd be a problem -- just throw in an XP SP2 CD and let the fun begin, right? Wrong. We knew we were in trouble when setup couldn't even find the SATA HDD!

So throughout this week I've been tinkering with what's out there, and finally managed to hack together a set of drivers that gets everything working but the Fn keys for LCD control and the S1 and AV MODE buttons.

First things first, you have to slipstream the SATA driver into your XP install disc. To do that, you'll need the SATA driver and nLite.

Here's the SATA driver:
http://www.comradef.com/files/miscellaneous/Vaio VGN-NR160E XP SATA 1.0.zip (200 KB)

In nLite, go through the wizard and eventually click "Add Single Driver". Browse to "iaahci.inf" and select Text-Mode Driver. Pick "Intel(R) 82801HEM/HBM SATA AHCI Controller" and burn. Now you should be able to boot from disc and install XP.

After that, you need to get all your other OS drivers installed. I've created a driver compilation directly from manufacturers like Intel, drivers for other Vaio notebooks, and a few goodies from the C:\Windows\Drivers\EXE\ directory on the original Vista install.

Not everything will work immediately. Audio, for example, will require you to run through the Device Manager and manually tell it to just use the new default drivers (which it will have after you've installed them).

Also, the Memory Stick icon registry patch doesn't fix anything on its own... So I made a blank DLL and injected a Sony Memory Stick icon into it so that it'll work! You'll see what I'm talking about when you get there.

Here's the XP driver set:
http://www.comradef.com/files/miscellaneous/Vaio VGN-NR160E XP Drivers 1.0.zip (80.2 MB)

By the way, I'd appreciate it if someone could mirror this for me. I don't have all the bandwidth in the world and I will have to remove this from my server if I get hit too hard!

 

Turns out we may have a solution for the lack of Fn + F7. The Intel graphics drivers has some cool hotkeys -- right click the blue "Intel(R) Graphics Media Accelerator Driver for Mobile" icon in your System Tray and play around a little. In particular, pay attention to Graphics Properties... -> Hotkeys. This is great news for me because I have a new widescreen LCD that I want to use with this laptop!

Still no fix for brightness keys, but at least this helps.

 

hi there i will try drivers on my nr180e hope it will work also i upload drivers to rapid share here is the link http://rapidshare.com/files/88374997/Vaio_VGN-NR160E_XP_Drivers_1.0.zip;)
thanks

 

hi ComradeF you are the greatest... it totally worked on my nr180e and no problem with audio just installed drivers. running xp no problems thanks a lot , you save me (shame for brightness )

 

Instead of slipstreaming, is it possible to set the sata as ide emulation in bios as opposed to ahci? btw, which key do I press to get into the BIOS? F2/F10/Del didn't seem to do the trick for me...

According to some reviewer, Sony won't support a downgrade to XP until the 1st quarter of 2008. Can anyone confirm this?

 

I had purchased a VGN-NR160E. as I was trying some partition software, all the partitions got deleted. And now I have installed a vista ultimate. I had downloaded all the drivers and software’s from sony’s site. But I didn’t find all the software’s which came pre installed earlier with the notebook. Softwere’s like vaio camera capture utility, vaio update 3, viv dvd software for vaio.. etc etc.

And there was a very imp software for me that I is to use, I don’t remember the name, but it was a audio tool which is to allow me to boost the bass, select different environment, surround effect and all. I want it very badly.
And I also couldn’t find out driver for S1 and AV button and couldn’t use the FN key to adjust the brightness.

can u pls send me the link from where I can download all this software’s

 

On my VGN-NR160E XP is running fine, except for the brightness keys, wich are dead.
Another problem is that when I close the LCD panel, the machine reboots instead of going to standby or hibernate.
Does anyone has a fix for this?

 

i recently bought that laptop and want to install xp. i read your post and downloaded the driver pack you put up. what is the name of the file that i need to slipstream (sata driver) into the new xp installation cd using nlite and where does it go on the disk install?

thank you for your help, i greatly appreciate it.

~ nick

 

Hi. nick

I can send you the drivers I used here, just gimme your email.

David

 

Hi guys. Same problem here. I downloaded the drivers and used Nlite to slipstream into Windows XP install but Windows XP still states it does not detect a hard drive? Is the SATA HD driver separate? Where in the Windows XP install should the files be slipstreamed? Thanks for any help you can provide because this Vaio is useless with Vista.

 

Never mind; i got it. Thanks!

 

Strange that you encountered this as well. I've programmed my Power Settings to Standby upon lid-close and to Hibernate upon pressing the Power button. At first, Hibernate would actually reboot the laptop instead of Hibernating... very annoying. I played around with some settings and it eventually worked -- I have my desired results. Unfortunately, I don't know exactly what fixed it.

I suspect it might have had something to do with disabling (My Computer -> Properties -> Advanced -> Startup and Recovery -> System failure -> Automatically restart), but I re-enabled that after I got a successful Hibernate and it *still* works. And now that I think about it, it probably isn't all that wise to instruct Windows to keep a system crash in its current operating state and then try to load that back up! Assuming a crash at the end of the Hibernate was the problem, that is...

 

I have the same issue. I have the hitachi drive..dowloaded the xp driver pack, and tried to slipstream the drivers, but still found no hard drive. Maybe I did it wrong. What ones are the correct drivers? And how are they integrated? Would appreciate any help.

Thanks

 

Just wanted to let everyone know that I've updated the original post with the SATA drivers we used to make the XP install disc work. Included are the drivers and some instructions for how to slipstream them in.

 

Go to http://esupport.sony.com/EN/osmig/xpclean.html for complete instructions on the steps for installing windows xp on the laptop, the drives and software have installtion dependencies so be sure to install them in the order they have been listed, that should fix the hibernation issue as well, be sure to install the patch from microsoft to fix the problem. Also, make sure to reset the BIOS to defaults before you start the installation. For those of you who have slip streamed the xp cd, press f6 during the initial setup.

 

Thanks for your helpful posts. I have a 180E. I seem to get through the Nlite portion and the SATA driver portion OK. I end up with a tmp directory of the XP SP2 disk which contains two additional .ini files.

When I burn these file to a new CD, I get a CD which does not boot directly.

What might I be doing wrong when I burn the disk? Should I highlight all the files in my temp folder?

I did everything according to the program so I am just trying to do this correctly.

Elsewhere, I have followed a thread which leads to a download on http://esupport.sony.com which gives all the XP drivers needed. It is from March of this year.


Thanks for your help.


Truly a Newbie,

Bill Miller

 

Hi,

First, thank you guys, these forum encouraged me to install XP on my nr160e.
Well, everything is fine, except for my audio driver. I remember that in Win Vista, it was a tool from realtek to change the behaviour of the driver (Realtek HD Audio Sound Effect Manager) and this I couln't get work on XP.

Anyone knows how to solve this issue?

 

Hello.

I would like to thank you very much.

Initially, when i went to the sony esupport page, I thought the drivers would work for me.

Surprise: most of them required windows xp sp2 to install properly.

Following the steps almost to the letter from:
esupport.sony.com/EN/osmig/xpclean.html

and using the drivers provided by sony and you, I reached the point where I got a nice installation with a single drawback: brightness set to full.

Especially the chipset, modem and wireless were useful from your driver base.

Note: I had some problems with the alps pointing device (no scroll on the touchpad), but I downloaded the latest version by googling for it.

But tonight I found a link for a user created app that does backlight control for NR110 (and also NR160ES):
http://rapidshare.com/files/89539630/backlight111.zip.html

I installed the app first by installing the required/included libraries:
MemAccDrvSetup.exe
vcredist_x86.exe
and then ran the app: backlight 2

OBS: the app requires a number in the command line - between 1 and 9 (without it will cause a blue screen).
Dynamically it uses the win +F5, +F6 keys instead of fn+f5, f6, but it works for me and more importantly, it saves battery on my machine.

Maybe you can update the driver base with this app, for a complete solution to port Sony VGN-NR160E under Windows XP.

Cheers.

 

Are you guys using a 64 bit version of windows or just a normal? I slipstreamed and burned a copy of XP Pro SP2 and the Vaio is not recognizing the boot disc, I have made sure that the Internal Optical drive is at the top of the boot list but it still doesn't work...
Ideas/Help?!

Update: Nevermind, I just didn't burn a specifically "boot disc" just a normal disc, I got it up and running. Thanks for the thread and the driver packages guys!