XP on Vista Laptop

[puya.ro]

K so i'm trying to fix this guys' laptop and its a newish HP ( dunno the model right now ) that was originally bought in Spain.

He came to Calgary and he wants to put XP on it instead of Vista.
Now i tried booting with the XP cd i have but since it has a HDD of 250 Gb, it wont recognize it thus giving me the blue screen of death. lol.

there's no space for me to install a floppy drive on the laptop so to install the hdd drivers before the XP install...


is there any other way of doing this withoug the floppy drive/disk????


thanks in advance

[Grogador]

Why would a 250GB harddrive matter to the XP CD? Try a WinXP disk with SP3 streamlined, might have some other drivers you need...

[puya.ro]

Oooohhhhhhh... right. i forgot about the sp3. for some reason i only thought sp2 is all i can do.

thanks ill try it tonight

[Grogador]

Look up the drivers on HP's website, or order the "XP downgrade" kit if available.

[Thaco]

HP generally does not provide drivers for "xp downgrades" i did this myself and had to use a few non-legit drivers to make my computer functional...

[Daxin]

I've done some research on this topic and found that HP, Toshiba, pretty much everyone except ACER and ASUS will NOT have supporting drivers for their laptops. As well, ACER and ASUS still will not have all the correect drivers.

YOu can use some generic drivers but will lose some functions of your laptop.

[Boat]

you have to change something in the bios.. i did the EXACT same thing for my dell vostro ,
its something to do with the newer HDD's that operate on SATA rather than ATA older laptops use.

So in my bios i went to "SATA operation", then it was configured for AHCI as factory default, i changed it to ATA and it worked like a charm!

check for something similar in the bios,

hope this works!

[Davetronz]

Yup, disable the SATA Native Mode or SATA Native Emulation and it should work. We need to do that with all our corporate HP laptops at work when we deploy a XP image on them.
If you don't disable the SATA native mode, it gives the BSOD on first boot.