[dxnib1]

hello there,

recently i bought a new Toshiba laptop. an Equiem A300D.
i was hoping that it would come with XP however this was not the case. and as most systems are doing (if-not all), it came with vista.

iv nothing against vista i use it on my desktop. however vista on a laptop (with, somewhat less than moderate specs) isn't an ideal situation to be in when i use laptops a lot for work. i feel it runs slower and there's certainly long periods of pro-longed loading (even in the simplest of tasks). in total its certainly slower than my last laptop which had XP and far-far worse specs.

anyway. i know that this laptop was shipped with XP in the previous year, and i know a few people with the same laptop with XP on it. there's even a full list of my laptop specific drivers for XP, on the Toshiba website.

iv more recently managed to buy a copy of XP. which i plan to install over Vista. however. when i try to install XP it tells me that it 'could not detect any hard disks' and then forces me to quit the installation.

looking around the internet iv found it possible to add new drivers via USB floppy, upon the XP booting phase. that will allow XP to see my hard-drives.

although this is where my knowledge ends. i am completely lost to which drivers i need to add via USB. and this is where i come to you for help.

my system specs are:
AMD turion X2Dual Core RM-70
3GB DDR2 memory.
140GB hard-disk
ATI Mobility Radeon graphics card.

in total, what i'd like to know is: what drivers do i need to make XP recognize my hard-disk. and where, (if possible) to download them, or how to extract them from my Vista installation.

i apologies for just joining and posting like this. its not something i usually do but for once i need to give up and admit i don't have a clue.

i thank you all for your help and hope to hear from you guys and girls soon.

David.

[Hybr!d]

Sounds like you have an SATA hard drive.

Access your BIOS and setup the SATA hard drive controller to IDE mode.

[dxnib1]

sounds 'newbish' i know. but how would i go about doing that? i know how to get into the bios, after that its like a jungle to me.

thanks for the reply.

David.

[Hybr!d]

http://www.computer-juice.com/forums...ess-bios-3997/

[dxnib1]

i'm in the Bios now, i found 'Sata Controller Mode:' under the 'Advanced' tab.
the options are 'AHCI' or 'Compatibility'

the default is 'AHCI' or at least i assume it is. iv never chanced bio's setting before.

any advice?

[dxnib1]

Originally Posted by dxnib1

i'm in the Bios now, i found 'Sata Controller Mode:' under the 'Advanced' tab.
the options are 'AHCI' or 'Compatibility'

the default is 'AHCI' or at least i assume it is. iv never chanced bio's setting before.

any advice?

did some more searching on the net and found a rather confusing article on the BIO's, i dont fully understand it but i changed the drive to 'Compatibility' and XP is installing as i speak!.

is there anything that changes with the computer by having the HD set to 'compatibility' ?

David.

oh, and thanks! :D

[Hybr!d]

It just makes the laptop think you have an IDE HD instead of a SATA one, SATA drives need drivers so this is why XP install cannot detect them.

You should be able to change it back when XP is installed.

No problem, glad to help.