Slipstream Windows XP with SATA Drivers

Last week one of my friend gave me his Sony Vaio-VGN-NS135e laptop to change its Operating System from Windows Vista to Windows xp.

Initially i thought that it would be a simple installation process but i was wrong.

when i BOOTED from xp cd the installation process started and it started to load drivers .but after minute or so the blue screen error message was displayed saying......

the system was clean so there was no chance it being infected by virus.But the error message saying that check for hard drive corruption clearly indicate that there must some problem with Setup detecting SATA hard disk.

Windows XP setup installation interface does not detect and recognize any of the hard disks mounted on S-ATA (Serial ATA) ports, and thus XP installer cannot find usable physical disks on the computer system and unable to continue to install XP, forcing you to quit by pressing F3.

The first Solution to this problem was using motherboard manufacturers floppy disk with needed SATA driver, which you can then use F6 button during initial setup stage to add drivers.

But my friends laptop was not shipped with any such floppy disk and also i need to purchase a new USB Floppy Drive which was Costly.

The next option was related with BIOS setting.

There is a ACHI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) hardware mechanism which are designed to allow software to communicate with Serial ATA (SATA) devices.Windows XP (and any OS older than Vista ) does not have came pre-packaged with driver to support AHCI/SATA mode.Users can install Windows XP on an AHCI enabled system by changing BIOS setting to disable AHCI (which includes AHCI in its functions) and use native SATA IDE emulation mode (SATA/PATA). In SATA IDE Emulation mode, XP setup could find the SATA drives and proceed to continue to install XP properly.

But in my case the BIOS was not showing any such option of changing the setting,so this option was also closed for me.

The only Last option that was left with me was to Slipstream Windows XP with SATA Drivers.

More of this Slipstreaming process in my next Blog Entry till then BYE.