I'd like to replace Vista Home Premium 64 bit with XP Pro 32 bit (so few drivers available for the software I use most). New laptop came with no disks just a preinstall routine (Future Shop). When I reset machine to boot from CD drive, Windows XP gives me a "no hard drives available on this machine" error message. Suggestions? Thanks. David

Need to know the Product description to see if there are drivers out there for your laptop. If you could post your model number. Also If there are drivers available for your laptop, then you might be able to intergrate the drivers for you harddrive in the xp cd using nlite. Jim R

Thanks Jim: here are the specs. Toshiba notebook with AMD Turion(tm) X2 Dual Core Mobile RM-70 200.GHz with 3 GB memory and Vista Home Premium 64 bit operation system. David

Satellite A300D David

Firstly why ask XP install ?? in a Vista Forum ? Secondly by using the search function in XP FORUM you would of found that you will need to offer the SATA DRIVERS on Floppy at start of XP Install, it states press F6 for additional drivers. If you have no floppy you will need to create a slipstream XP CD!

SATA drivers are not needed. The problem is that the BIOS has the hard drive controller set to AHCI mode. It needs changed to IDE compatible (I do not know the specifics for that system). What happens is that Vista uses AHCI and it is not compatible with XP. This comes up on laptops and desktops I service when someone wants to retrofit with XP and remove Vista. Richard