Installing XP on SATA laptop drive (not recognized)

[brown399]

I built a laptop a few months back, but ended up having to installin windows vista on it because the windows setup didn't see the SATA drive. I slipstreamed a windows xp disk with the raid drivers that came with the laptop (it was pretty much a bootleg chinese barebones case with a good graphics card, and i newegged all the other parts), but it didnt work (possibly because it wasnt sata drivers but raid drivers).

I've heared that this is a pretty notorious problem (not being able to install windows xp on new laptop sata drives) and was wondering if there is a workaround that i could attempt...windows vista blows and i only have win7 64 bit (laptop doesn't have very much memory or a very good cpu..<3 xp)

any info on the topic would be great.

Thanks

 

[brown399]

bump?

 

[runswindows95]

Go into the BIOS, and change the SATA mode from AHCI to IDE. This is what I did with my SATA drive, and XP installed with no problems.

 

[Paperdoc]

runswindows95 has the solution there. Win XP cannot use SATA, AHCI or RAId devices, but many BIOS's have a SATA Port Modes setting for IDE (or PATA) Emulation. Set it that way and it will fool Windows into thinking it is dealing with a plain old IDE drive it understands, and it will work.

 

[brown399]

that was one of the first things i tried to do but, on account of the bootleg barebones nature of the mobo, there is basically nothing but time and date in the bios...

I never looked for a bios revision, but i would be very surprised if there is one.. =[

 

[runswindows95]

There should be something in the BIOS. Even my HP laptop had it, and OEM motherboards are famous for being very basic.