halostar

Hello everyone,

This is my first post on this forum. I am currently trying to downgrade my HP Pavilion DV9700 notebook from Vista to XP. I currently own Windows XP Professional with SP2. Each time I have tried to perform the downgrade by inserting the XP installation disk I receive the error message that no hard drives have been detected on my system. Would the fact that my notebook already came prepackaged with 2 hard drives in it have anything to do with this? Could this possibly be a SATA RAID driver issue?

I have read elsewhere of others who have "slipstreamed" drivers into their installation. I am currently doing some research on this. Any advice in any or all of these areas would be great!

Please let me know your thoughts as I would really appreciate any input. Vista very noticeably slows down my notebook and I want it off.

Thanks!

TriggerFinger

May this link can help: http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/s...224049&lang=en

dai

Vista to XP Downgrade Compaq/ HP F700/G6000/DV6900/DV6700/DVx7xx/DV9800 Series Laptop

halostar

Okay, see I have looked over the pages you have linked. I already have downloaded all of the XP drivers provided on the HP website for almost every single one of the components. So in that regard, I am already set. HOWEVER.. I cannot install ANY drivers unless I can get XP installed on the machine. So don't believe these links really help in that regard (unless I am missing something???).

Also, I see that the one site is for a bunch of different notebook series with AMD processors ONLY... my laptop has the Intel Core 2 Duo.

I guess my main question right now would be why is my laptop telling me that it cannot detect any hard drives to install XP on???

JASEY_____

try doing a fresh installation by booting your computer using your XP installer... i just want to remind you that it will void any warranty that you have if your notebook came with vista on it...

dai

xp has no native sata support

you have to set sata as ide in the bios and or load a sata driver with f6 when it asks

or it will load into ram and when it hands over to the h/drive on the first reboot,it will stop when it does not find the drive

halostar

Yes, I understand that I will void any warranty.. but that's okay because I've owned my notebook well over a year and my warranty ran out a while ago. I already have my boot order setup so that my DVD drive boots before the hard drive. I start up my notebook with the XP CD installation disk already in the drive and I get all the way through the setup process only to get to the point where you can create a new partition or delete a partition, but it cannot do either of these because it says NO HARD DRIVE DETECTED. This is where I am stuck and trying to find out what I should do?

The notebook has a quantity of (2) Samsung 160GB SATA hard drives on it.

dai

we posted at the same time the answer is in my last post

halostar

Ah, okay... well, I see that there is no option in the provided HP Phoenix BIOS that will allow me to change SATA to IDE on the hard drive. It gives me no options for the hard drive whatsoever. The only option, out of all options, that I am given with the hard drive in is the boot order and which item boots first, second, etc. So,.. if I wanted to load the SATA drivers during XP's installation setup how could I do this with a jump drive (since my laptop has no floppy)? I tried just plugging in the jump drive before setup and pressing F6 at the appropriate time to try installing the drivers I placed on the jump drive, but that did not work. XP just showed the jump drive as a partition. There must be some way I need to setup the jump drive to prepare it for that or something I need to do during setup to get it to recognize that it must read the jump drive, but I am not aware of how this can be done. I am not sure how to approach this part. Any suggestions?


Also, I am currently researching about slipstreaming. I have read that this could automatically install the necessary SATA drivers during install, as well. How would this work?