How to install Win XP on SATA

Most of the laptops now are configured for Vista but according to me Vista sucks and many of you may or not agree with me. However, if you want to remove the Vista from the laptop and install XP, even though you are expert in XP, you will find this step sucking because after the XP has already loaded the drivers and that you will press enter to continue, the installation will not start and you will get a message telling you that there is no hard drive or plug the hard drive in the system. Well the problem is not that there is a problem with the laptop or with the hard drive but with the XP. Win XP does not contain driver for SATA and Microsoft will never put it and release another version of XP because MS is money minded.

There are some solutions for this situation. Firstly you can press F6 when the XP is booting and before XP loads the driver, you will find a message at the bottom that press F6 to load third party drivers. For this solution you will a USD FLOPPY DRIVE but not a USB pen drive. Get this point clear; USB floppy drive or a floppy drive. But in most cases you can’t invest to buy a USB floppy drive just for this situation and then through the USB floppy drive and most laptops these days don’t have a floppy drive. So, you can borrow a USB floppy drive from someone and copy the driver of the SATA hard drive into it and plug the USB floppy drive to the USB before booting the XP. Then you press F6 to load this third party driver. I think this solution is the easiest but you will need a hardware that is a USB floppy drive. I got this problem with a DELL INSPIRON 1525 two days ago.

Next, the best solution but quite complex and sometime does not work. By modifying XP bootable CD itself. You will need a blank DVD, about 1GB space in any running OS and a freeware called NLITE. Download this freeware and install it. Put your WIN XP cd into your DVD/CD drive. Save the hard drive driver in a folder and open NLITE. You will need to copy all the files in XP cd to your local drive but don’t worry NLITE will do it for you. To insert the SATA drivers within the installation package, you need to have  it saved on the HDD. Hence, when the warning window appears click OK and select the destination folder for the files to be saved. Make sure that the destination partition / HDD has enough space to store the contents of the installation CD.

Immediately after you have chosen the destination folder, the application will start copying the Windows installation files. When finished, it will display some version information regarding the newly copied Windows Installation Package.

Now, click next twice until  you get  to a screen where you get  options sorted  in 4 categories: Integrate, Remove, Setup, Create. We are  interested  in the  integration procedure, therefore select  the Drivers button and click next. From the next menu window, click Insert  and select  multiple drive  folder option  from the drop down menu. This option permits you to browse to the location where the downloaded drivers are found.
Select the containing directory and click next. You will get a list with the available drivers (in case there are more than one) or simply one driver. Select it (them) and click next. Now the application will ask for the permission to start the integration procedure. Choose Yes and wait for the drivers to be inserted into the installation package.

With problematic driver being included in the installation package you can install Win XP on your SATA HDD…but…the installation package is on the HDD. You need a bootable CD in order to start an installation. Don’t worry, once the installation package has been adorned with additional user selected drivers it can be transformed into a bootable disk image and later burned on a CD. To encapsulate the installation into a ISO image use the same Nlite application. Open it, make sure the HDD installation folder is selected and click next. Select “Last session” preset and click next again. Now from the options menu choose Bootable ISO and click next. In the following window, make sure that the mode is set to “Create Image” and click Make ISO. A destination folder is required where the resulting ISO image will be saved. Once the image saving process finished you have the freedom to burn it on a blank CD with whatever you favorite CD burner software may be.

VOILA its done!!! cAiMpS

~ by faardeen on October 26, 2008.