jat450

Hi all,

I recently purchased a new notebook that came with Vista. I didn't want to pay the downgrade fee to XP, but a friend of mine gave me a copy of XP to install. I decided I wanted to switch to XP, but I'm unsure as how I should go about the process. He mentioned something about getting into the BIOS section and booting from CD. Also, would anyone be able to tell me if a) all my drivers will be gone and b) my notebook came preset with the hard drive partitioned into 2, will this be the same case for when I install XP?

Also, I was thinking that my notebook could do with an upgrade of RAM, as it only came with 1 GB (2 x 512 MB). Would anyone know if I would be able to, and to what extent if so?

Thanks.

Attached Files

DxDiag.txt (35.7 KB, 4 views)

Dusten04

to get into BIOS to boot from CD
1)click F12 or F10 or F2, it is one of those.
2)click boot from CD

it is really easy from there to figure out how to format it....
yes all your drivers will be gone, you have to reinstall them

jat450

Thanks for your advice, it's much appreciated. I don't suppose you'd know about my RAM issue?

jat450

I managed to boot from my XP cd. However, I get a message saying that no hard drives can be detected and Setup is unable to continue. What should I do?

wrench97

What kind of XP CD is it I.E. Full Retail, Upgrade, OEM, or a System Manufacturers disk

Dusten04

i dont know that much about ram.
what kind of OS is it I.E. windows xp pro, media,

jat450

It's Windows XP Home Premium. I think it is a retail version, but I'm not sure. Is there anyway to check? I found this page referring to the hard drive issue:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windo...-installation/

But I'm not sure if it'll work for my Acer. And if it will, it wouldn't change my friend's XP CD in any way would it?

wrench97

No you can burn a slipstreamed CD with Nlite and it won't hurt the orginal cd,
But the question becomes what are you going to use for a key to activate windows?
What model Acer do you have?

jat450

My friend's CD came with a key, and he's lent to many people before with no problems. I'm not sure whether this will matter because nLite creates a new XP CD.

However, I tried to follow the nLite procedure; I downloaded all the XP drivers for my notebook from the Acer site:

http://www.acerpanam.com/synapse/for...d=3394#results

And I slipstreamed my friend's XP CD with the drivers, but it still does not detect the hard drive upon booting from the new CD. I don't have an external floppy drive by the way, so I can't do it that way. Geez, I hate Vista. lol

wrench97

Are you sure you have a Sata harddrive?
Next you really shouldn't be using someone elses key because it will lead to WGA problems later down the road.
I think you need to set the drive to IDE mode in the Bios setup screen so the XP disc can see it when it boots, that is if it is a Sata drive.

Dusten04

you can a OS system disk.... it will not "boot from disk" and it is highly illegal

jat450

I'm pretty sure I have a SATA drive, I think that's the reason why XP won't detect my hard drive. With regards to the IDE, I attempted to modify it, but my BIOS has been dummed down a fair bit, so the only things I have access to are pretty much boot order, ASF configuration and any passwords I would wish to have.

Also, I'm running an Acer Extensa 5620, by the way. Sorry, didn't see your question before.

And my friend's XP is legit, he's just let people borrow it a fair bit, but they've never had any problems whatsoever with WGA or anything, from what I've heard anyway.

jat450

Furthermore, I had a closer look at my Dxdiag, and whilst I'm not 100% sure if my HDD is SATA, I definitely do have some SATA hardware.

And, I think nLite would work, but I'm just not sure what the 'drivers' actually refer to, during the driver integration stage. Does it mean the actual drivers for all the devices on my notebook?

wrench97

Hit F2 to access the BIOS, and change the setting on the second page from AHCI to IDE

Link to Acer driver downloads pick the drivers that pertain to your hardware, there are XP & Vista drivers on the list pick out the XP drivers you need before load ing XP if you don't see one let us know before you start.
http://www.acerpanam.com/flex/acerdr...TOKEN=42815686

jat450

So the 'drivers' in the nLite method refer to all my notebook's drivers for XP?

Also, if that's the case, I have already done this. Although, I'm not sure if I did it right. Basically, I downloaded all the drivers for XP, then I extracted all of them and integrated all the .inf files I could find, but some of the driver archives had sub-folders with more inf files, which I included. Then I integrated all of those .inf files and burned a new CD. I still had the same problem.

I'll try to get some help from the techs at my university, if they're willing, in the meantime.

wrench97

I would not integrate the drivers other than the Sata driver at this point.

Do you have the second page in the Bios with the AHCI / IDE setting?

jat450

Nope, I don't have that page.

wrench97

Then you need to update the Bios to the latest revision.

jat450

How would I go about doing that? I can't do anything in my BIOS apart from changing boot order, effectively.