Hello everyone! My wife bought a Toshiba laptop with Vista Home preinstalled on the 1,5GB partition of HD and asked me to proceed with the installation of the system. I've made the system installation but she told me that Vista is not the system she would like and I offered her making a trial with XP from my laptop and I would install the Ultimate version on mine later. When I put the XP installation CD dedicated for SATA HD it started the installation but soon stopped with the message that there is no HD in the computer! My question is what kind of file system made the original installation on the HD that the previous versions of OS doesn't recognise it? And also why Norton Ghost didn't see anything when I tried to make a partition image? Thank you all for your valuable comments! Zennon

For an XP cd to see a SATA drive, it must be XP, SP2 (service pack 2). Any previous version of an XP cd won't pick up SATA as it didn't have drivers. Then there's SATA 150 and 300. Which is another story. Just guessing, but you don't have the SP2 verison of XP. www.computerselfdefense.com

Hi brokencrow, I believe that the XP installation CD I used was the latest one with SP2 included and also the HD in the new laptop was SATA so I thought it should be rather simple to downgrade to have XP on it. But nevertheless what surprised me, was that Norton Ghost couldn't see any partition on the new drive. Does that mean that having Vista in any version I won't be able to do partition backup with Ghost? Zennon

Installing XP on a SATA drive requires drivers for the SATA drive, which are NOT included on the XP cd, but can be slipstreamed on to it, or put on a floppy disk if your computer has one. You will need to get the driver from the Toshiba website and all other drivers for your laptop for XP. As for partitioning with Ghost, you will need a Vista compatible version, it's 11 & 12. Personally I prefer Acronis True Image, version 10 supports Vista and the new one is Version 11.

I agree with anmor. I thought that SP2 also required SATA drivers for some SATA drives, but not all. Don't post if you ate razor blades for breakfast!

You know what? I ran into this same issue with Lenovo's at work last year. Go into the bios and look at the SATA settings. There's a SATA compatibility mode you can toggle. Try that... www.computerselfdefense.com