[Razer]

Experiencing a problem with Dual booting.

I have Vista installed on the C: drive and i have another drive D:. Vista came preinstalled on my Laptop and i have my copy of XP pro ready and waiting. ive got some instruction from http://apcmag.com/5485/dualbooting_vista_and_xp and have been following these, avoiding the partition bit since i dont need to.

I throw XP in the CD tray and restart, i press a button and boot from XP, the XP loader loads and all is going ok, i get the options to setup, repair and quit but if i press either setup or repair XP cannot identify any hard drives are installed and active. The D: is easily big enough to house XP but i cant seem to get past this point. It is an NTFS file system.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Razer.

[spot]

The XP CD Setup "cannot identify any hard drives are installed and active"? I'm not sure whether "active" is a weasel word or not here. Can setup see the hard drive partitions at all? Can it see the hard drive (I take it you have two partitions on one physical drive). If it can't see the hard drive at all, what's the laptop? Does "It is an NTFS file system." refer to C:, D: or both? What told you?

[Razer]

I boot from the XP CD to install XP

it says "Windows cannot find any Hard-disks, please ensure there is a hard drive connected and it has power"

then the only option i get is to quit and restart.

Im not sure if the HDD is partitioned or 2 drives, i didnt partition it it was like that when i bought my laptop.

Both partitons/drives are NTFS

laptop is a Fujitsu Siemens Amilo LI1818

The XP boot setup (with the blue screen and no mouse) tells me it cannot find any hard drives.

[spot]

That makes sense then. The Laptop hard disk is SATA (Serial ATA) and if so you have to press f6 while the CD probes (it prompts you) and install the drivers supplied with the machine, the standard IDE drivers on the CD don't see your hardware. The drivers are also on the Fujitsu support website. You'll need to transfer them to a floppy if the laptop has a floppy drive, or to a USB memory stick.

[Razer]

much obliged mate, thanks

[Razer]

More trouble im afraid.

I cannot find the drivers for my motherboard, and dont have a floppy drive to install the drivers if i werent to find them.

Any help gettin around this would be massively appreciated.

thanks,
Razer

[philthomas]

All the drivers for the LI 1818 are available here.

If you have no floppy drive, use nlite, to create a new XP disk and slipstream the SATA driver.

[Razer]

i have the SATA drivers from the website, which are older than the ones on my machine.

I have extracted the .zip files to my pc and have browed to them in nlite but there are only inx and ini files, no inf files to install the drivers alongside XP.

it might be me doing something wrong but i could do with a step by step guide if anyone wants to bother typing one for me.

again any information is appreciated.

Razer

[philthomas]

Hmmmmm. it sounds like the driver on the website may be packaged in a self extracting exe file, which is confusing things perhaps.

I have the driver you need so I'll pop it up here for you.
My son has the same Laptop and we used nlite to address the problem.
One other point, if you have trouble getting the XP wireless network driver (I couldn't find one anywhere last Sept), use Device Manager and let it search the net for the driver. This was the only way I could find it.

Good Luck

[Gazmondo]

Originally Posted by philthomas Hmmmmm. it sounds like the driver on the website may be packaged in a self extracting exe file, which is confusing things perhaps. I have the driver you need so I'll pop it up here for you. My son has the same Laptop and we used nlite to address the problem. One other point, if you have trouble getting the XP wireless network driver (I couldn't find one anywhere last Sept), use Device Manager and let it search the net for the driver. This was the only way I could find it. Good Luck

Most of the SATA/RAID drivers I've downloaded usually are self-extracting .exe's