I have a sony vaio laptop VGN-F31E and am trying to install Win XP. I have a new HD and whem booted from win XP Pro CD after drivers are loaded I get the blue screen of death with the error 0x00007B ()xF78D2524,0xC00000034, 0x0,0x0). How can I solve this to install Win XP.

Your Vaio most probably has SATA hdd. Win XP does not natively recognize SATA hdd. Therefore, installation cannot continue. What you can do is, you can slipstream SATA drivers into Win XP installation CD and install Win XP that way. For SATA driver integration into WinXP CD, nlite will be helpful: http://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html You can obtain SATA drivers for XP from hdd manufacturer site. If yours were a desktop rather than a laptop, you could feed SATA drivers during Win XP installation via a diskette drive. But you cannot install a diskette drive in a laptop. By the way, USB diskette drive is not accepted during WinXP installation. Regards SuatCINI

... paste this link into your browser: ftp://ftp.vaio-link.com/pub/OS/XPDOWNGRADE/ ... there are a few Sata drivers here, download and unzip, stick 'em on a floppy or cd and offer them @ early "F6" key prompt during installation ... shown on bottom line of screen! . . ... Posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties http://img515.imageshack.us/img515/... Grrrr... ....more