[grkbar]

So I have a Dell Vostro 1500 that came with vista home basic (which is the worst of the worst). I tried running dban, but it would not complete the full nuke of my HD. It would just load the kernel and then crap out. I also tried deleting the partition of vista and just putting a fresh copy of xp on it, however; I keep getting a message saying that it cant find a HD to write to... wth? I think this is due to a boot file or something else that dell or vista has put on the laptop that is not allowing me to install XP. Please help :eek:

[jcortes]

STOP BLAMING VISTA FOR EVERY PROBLEM YOU HAVE!!!! the reason the XP CD wont boot is because the sata drivers are not loaded on the cd you have to slipstream them yourself or disable native sata support in your BIOS.

PS: I have not had a single problem with vista how come every one else does. I have more problems at work with the xp machines.

[Mak213]

Hello,

No. Dell did nothing to the machine. Vista did nothing to the machine. Are you sure that the software you are using can read your hard drive? Can it read SATA Drives?

Vista does nothing to your system. Get your facts right please. There is no boot file put on there by Vista or Dell that would stop it from loading a CD at all. If that was the case i would have never been able to load Vista, Server 2008 or Ubuntu on my Dell. Which is a Dimension 8400. Much older than yours.

JCortes,

I fully agree. I have run Vista since it was Beta and have had few problems with it. All of them were my fault.

Cheers,
Mak

[EricB]

go into your bios settings. change your sata hdd to sata mode from achi (something like that) mode. ignore the warning messages.

download this

Vostro 1500 sata driver

extract it to floppy

boot with the xp disc. hit f6 at the beginning of it when prompt to load 3rd party drivers. insert floppy when prompt. load the driver to finish the install.

they are purposely doing this on new computer so people won't go back to xp. the xp cd can't find the driver now matter how you load it, but vista can because it has sata driver on it. intergrating the sata xp driver with nlite won't fix the problem either. it still won't find the drive. I've had this issue on 3-4 new laptops that people wanted to put xp on.

[grkbar]

Thanks for the help I just have some compatibility issues with my work applications and it just keeps freezing on randomly. So Vista could be a great option for you, but not for myself. But thanks for the help, it was the sata bios setting that was doing it. :/

[forrestcupp]

Originally Posted by EricB

they are purposely doing this on new computer so people won't go back to xp.

Or maybe they're purposely doing this because sata drives are a lot better than the old EIDE drives that XP supported.

[Lexluethar]

Originally Posted by forrestcupp

Or maybe they're purposely doing this because sata drives are a lot better than the old EIDE drives that XP supported.

Haha, wow ya can't even believe that people are actually thinking that is the reason. No no its not because SATA pushes data twice as fast as ATA. No no, that isn't the reason, it is because of Microsoft and all of their evil plans....

[EricB]

Originally Posted by forrestcupp

Or maybe they're purposely doing this because sata drives are a lot better than the old EIDE drives that XP supported.

achi mode use to mean that the sata hdd would look like an ide drive, so that you didn't need to hit f6 to install the drivers. on the new laptops it has come to have a new definition because it doesn't come close to resembling an ide drive

[forrestcupp]

Originally Posted by EricB

achi mode use to mean that the sata hdd would look like an ide drive, so that you didn't need to hit f6 to install the drivers. on the new laptops it has come to have a new definition because it doesn't come close to resembling an ide drive

Ok, so you're not talking about sata drives; you're talking about the achi compatibility mode.

I understand now. I don't know if it's true or not that they are doing that just to try to keep people from going back to XP. If I were MS, I wouldn't really want people going back, either. For MS, it's kind of like buying a new house before you sell your old one and having to keep them both up.