sorry there have probably been millions of threads like this.

[xs0u1x]

about a year ago i bought an emachines T5224. It had vista home premium 32bit version installed on it and i was pumped to use it. after about a week of playing with it i had a massive headache and was desperately trying to find my xp pro cd. to my delight the xp pro cd would not recognize my hard drive -at all- no matter what i tried to do to fix the problem. after about 3 days of tinkering i gave up. now that i have given it a year is there any way to upgrade to xp from this mammoth piece of crap? any advice would be much appreciated. any info needed for a solution just ask.

[superdave1984]

I am guessing your HD is SATA. Did you install the SATA drivers when prompted? Or you just need to take the drive out and put it back in along with clearing your CMOS. Frequently this does work.

[xs0u1x]

Originally Posted by superdave1984

I am guessing your HD is SATA. Did you install the SATA drivers when prompted? Or you just need to take the drive out and put it back in along with clearing your CMOS. Frequently this does work.

yes i tried the drivers but did not think about taking it out. to clear the cmos i just take it out right?

[bla!!]

Also, if you don't care about the little improvements, look in your bios for something about "sata native mode" or the likes.

Disable it and XP should find your HD just fine.

[Trotter]

To clear the CMOS, unplug the computer, and then remove the watch battery from the motherboard for a few seconds. Ta-Da!

[Mak213]

Originally Posted by Trotter

To clear the CMOS, unplug the computer, and then remove the watch battery from the motherboard for a few seconds. Ta-Da!

While that is mostly true there are a few mobo's out there that also have a jumper for this as well.

Just move the jumper to clear the CMOS then move it back and you are all set. Dont even have to remove the battery.

[EricB]

download and integrate the sata drivers from this post into the xp cd. it will let you install on anything

Originally Posted by EricB

here's how you update you xp cd to have almost all drivers. you need the driver packs and the driver base software. here are the links

http://driverpacks.net/DriverPacks/

DriverPacks.net > DriverPacks > DriverPacks BASE

download driverbase. put your downloaded driver packs files in the driver pack folder that you get when you extract driver base download with 7zip

7-Zip

extract driver base. put your driver zip files in the right folder.



open driver base. click the arrows to get to the next screen. notice that i have an xp folder on my desktop (I have 2 actually. I use ryanvm integrater to slipstream all of xp updates into the disc too). you need the files there as driver doesn't copy your xp cd files to the hdd. you have to manually do it yourself or use nlite to copy the files to the hdd



if you put the files in the right place you will see the drivers on this screen. just follow the steps leaving the default options. you can change them if you understand them.


when you are done use nlite to create a bootable iso file from the folder.

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