Win XP doesnt see hard drive in Gateway laptop w/ Vista

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OrionNT

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Apr 14, 2002
Messages
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You'd have to have a BIOS that supported booting from USB floppy drives, which should be almost all of the new machine BIOS's released at this point. Short of this, removing the optical drive and installing a floppy won't help either, as you'll need the optical in order to start the OS install. Maybe there's a BIOS option to allow USB drives to be read as removable media...but in the case of Windows XP, the removable media will have to be mapped to drive letter A:\ in order for the the XP "F6" options to allow you to install the proper drive controller drivers. I wouldn't chance a Gateway support call either. They'll likely tell you that the laptop was designed for Vista...which doesn't have the "must load driver from A:\" problem.
 
You can create your own windows xp cd with the proper drivers with a program called nlite. Thats what i did.
 
You might also try disabling AHCI mode for the SATA controller in BIOS, if you need a quick fix. I do not recommend it though, as I am not sure how vista will react to it, not to mention the performance hit you take from running in compatibility mode.
 
shadowwyvern said:
You might also try disabling AHCI mode for the SATA controller in BIOS, if you need a quick fix. I do not recommend it though, as I am not sure how vista will react to it, not to mention the performance hit you take from running in compatibility mode.
Click to expand...

You can disable AHCI mode and select ATA instead and then when you load the correct drivers, you can switch it back to AHCI...
 
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