A friend of mine wants me to put XP on this Vista machine (HP model m8200n). It has an athlon x2 6000 cpu, 500gig sata hard drive, nvidia 6150se graphics, dvd burner, 3 gigs of ram, Hauppage tv tuner and an nforce 430 chipset. Now I have done this before to other vista machines and have found and installed the appropriate xp drivers on those machines by using the 'upgrade drivers' in 'device manager'. Now the only problem is that it has a sata hard drive and in 'device manager' it reads as an scsi device. My question is, do I go to the manufacturer of the hard drive and get a driver there, something I need to change in the bios perhaps or, when I start loading xp and it asks for a sata driver...should I just open up the case and plug in a floppy drive to load the sata driver from a floppy disk? Whew! Hope this wasn't confusing. All opinions are respected and appreciated. Loretta

This sounds pertinent. In the bios, it states the speed (3.0gb/s) and is and eide drive. What's wrong with this picture if anything? This is what I get for not keeping up on this stuff. Help. Loretta

The driver is for the SATA controller, not the actual drive. You can get the appropriate driver from the MBoard manufacturer, HP, or NVIDIA. I suggest you go to the link below and get the drivers for the 6150/430/WinXP. http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce...

Thanks for the reply. Okay, now I know that you can slipstream the sata drivers onto the XP install disk with nlite. Another option is to (if the system doesn't have a floppy drive) just plug in a floppy drive to the mboard and go from there. I guess those are my only 2 options as far installing the sata driver? Thanks. Loretta

Sorry I saw mention of a floppy drive and missed that there isn't one present. Actually, many BIOSes will configure a SATA drive in IDE compatibility mode. You need to check the BIOS settings. I'm pretty sure the NVidia chipset supports that. It is better to install the SATA drivers if the drive and controller are SATA II. You will get a transfer increase with the SATA drivers over IDE compatibility. I can't recall exactly what that compatibility mode is called in the BIOS settings. Appears the BIOS on that computer was setting the drive up as I described. If your version of WinXP does not include at least SP1 then the slipstream is the way to go for sure. You need that to use a drive larger than 127GB.

Might be just as well to run a virtual machine. I read it wrong and answer it wrong too. So get off my case you peanut.

Many thanks for the replies and suggestions. Can always count on this site for help. Gonna get started on it. Loretta