[tenlbham]

I have an old Toshiba A205-S5851 laptop with Vista that runs too slow for me anymore and I'm trying to downgrade it to XP. I've read here about using nLite to create a boot disk with the appropriate SATA drivers to get around the "no hard disk detected" issue, and I've tried to give that a go unsuccessfully so far.

I've downloaded drivers (32bit Intel RST AHCI & RAID driver v10.1.0.1008 WHQL.rar) for my chipset (Intel ICH8M SATA AHCI Controller) and stepped through the nLite process:

1) selecting the Windows installation CD location (DVD drive),
2) selecting a CD installation location for modification,
3) selecting "Drivers" and "Bootable ISO" from the Task Selection window,
4) choosing the .inf SATA driver to use

When nLite completes the process, it says the file size is over 6GB, which obviously won't fit on a DVD. Even if I try to burn to the disk, it tells me the (blank) disk is not empty and asks if I wish to erase it. It then crashes regardless of my choice at this point.

Has anyone run into this problem before? 6GB sounds way too big to be right. Every example I've seen of this process online shows screenshots with the file size being about 500MB. Am I missing something in this process?

Thank you.

 

[spunk.funk]

You first you have to copy your XP CD to the HDD of a the computer your running nLIte on, that your going to be burning the disc form. You can't use the XP CD in your CD drive, because you have to slipstream your SATA drivers , Service Packs and IE etc into the XP files on the HDD. Now, how large is the SATA drivers, they shouldn't be more then a few MB's? Here is step by step for nLite
and unless your adding a bunch of stuff it shouldn't be larger then a couple of GB's

 

[tenlbham]

Ah... the instructions I found for running nLite (on howtogeek.com) said you just point it to the optical drive containing your XP CD, not a copy of it on the HDD. I think the point of those instructions were for creating a boot disk that JUST had the necessary SATA drivers that could be run before popping in the XP CD, so that the machine would be able to find the HDD in the first place during the installation.

Can I do that, create a boot disk that I can use independent of the XP source, or does it HAVE to be incorporated into the installation CD(DVD)? I'm still learning about this slipstreaming process and not sure what all I can do with it.

Thanks!