Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of Ursala
UrsalaFlag for Canada

asked on

How do you input drivers for SATA Hard Drive during the F6 part of installing XP when there is no floppy in the laptop I wish to install XP in as a Dual Boot with Vista Home Premium?

I would like to dual boot my new Toshiba Laptop running Vista Home Premium to also run XP Pro. My licence states that I am permitted to downgrade to XP Pro.  I was able to successfully do this on my old Toshiba last year. It had IDE drives not SATA. The problem is that the XP does not recognize there is a drive present when I try to install it in this new laptop and I am sure it has to do with the fact that the drives are SATA. I have had to install drivers for the controllers when building desktop computers which is easy to do by adding a floppy.  I have no way of entering  the drivers for the SATA controllers as there is no floppy and it will not accept input from a USB pen drive or a USB floppy at this point. I have a valid retail licenced XP Pro that is not on any other computer.  Is there a way that I can add these drivers to my XP Installation disk by copying it and entering those drivers in a specific folder?  I know enough that you cannot just copy the disk and add files and expect it to boot up. I have done that part before. I just don't know where I should place these files and exactly what files are needed to accomplish this.

Thank you for any help you might be able to give me.
Avatar of aerion85
aerion85

You could use nLite to add the appropriate driver to a copy of your install CD, then boot and let Windows find the driver by itself.

http://www.nliteos.com
Avatar of Ursala

ASKER

I will try the nliteos as aerion85 suggested. I did mention my laptop would not accept the input of the drivers via a USB floppy or USB pen drive in my question. It was the first thing I tried before using the USB pen drive. Maybe other people have done it with a USB floppy but it did not work on my Toshiba.
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of Gary Case
Gary Case
Flag of United States of America image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
garycase is right, If you go into the BIOS (Press <F1> or <Esc> or whatever the message says to enter setup) when you turn the laptop on. You'll see an option in there on one of the menus, sorry not to be more specific but every BIOS is different. It'll be related to Storage or Internal drives.  It may say AHCI as garycase suggests or it may say something like compatibilty mode.  This will fool the laptop into thinking that you've got an old school IDE drive and XP will install fine.  You can install the drivers once XP is installed successfully and then change the setting you made in the BIOS back to how it currently is.
Avatar of Ursala

ASKER

Thank you for your help with the advice for changing the BIOS ACHI to disable. I have been sick for a week and will give it a try tomorrow. I appreicate your help Gary and Rob's expansion on how this BIOS change will work.
Avatar of Ursala

ASKER

I am sorry to be so late responding but this issue has not been resolved for me as I have had to send the laptop back to Toshiba due to a defect. I am going to close the question as I may not run into this problem again and I will just have to try out what has been suggested here. I am going to accept Gary Case's suggestion as robstacey also said he was right. I hope that is OK instead of leaving it open indefinitely. Thank you for your help and sorry again about being so late to respond
Avatar of Ursala

ASKER

I am going on the assumption that this would work since one other person said it was the right way to go about it and no one else had any comments to the contrary.