question installing xp

[ThirdLeft152]

alright so i have a laptop i have officially decided to take vista off and but xp on. the one problem i have is that during the install the hdd is not recognized (yes its sata, and i know that i have to install drivers, f6, before i continue the install of xp). my question is this, aside from going back to work to get my usb floppy drive, is there any other way to load these drivers? possibly on a usb flash drive?

thanks in advice for help.

[atomic tofu]

my bios does floppy emulation for usb...but i never actually tried this for anything, though might just for kicks

there seems to be many floppy emulation software out there for usb drives
Live Search: emulate floppy on usb

not vouching for any of the following software so provided the above search link...however I did take a gander at the following:

Hiren's BootCD From USB Flash Drive (Pen Drive) - www.hiren.info
Copy and run Floppy Boot Disks from USB

from the above ghacks page, I believe one link is dead and the other is german or something

you could alwas do the slipstream stuff, but I think this way might be easier for you, though either might be equaly easy

edit: the hiren thing may not do anything for ya, but interesting read...dork I am

[Mak213]

Atomic that solution wont work for many. As there is not many BIOS's that i have seen that does floppy emulation.

The answer is to use Slipstreaming. Only sure fire way to get the drivers added. Use Autostreamer. EricB gives instructions in this thread:

How to keep WinXP really fast & stable

It is a few posts down. But he gives all the answers on where to go for drivers and how to do this. Easiest way than trying to mess with BIOS emulation that is not guaranteed to work.