Can't see hard drive

[Guest]

Not sure this is the right place for this posting. We are buying Laptops with
Vista Business on them, then downgrading (or is the up) them to XP pro. This
has been going fine, but a director wanted to see vista so I booted one up
fully into the system and showed him.

Unfortunately now when I boot from the XP disk it says there are no drives
to install it on, but vista still boots without any problem.

How can I get the XP disk sot see the drive and allow me to wipe vista and
install XP?

 

[Ron Badour]

Go into the BIOS and make sure the first boot device is the CDRom drive.
With the XP CD inserted, reboot and you should get an installation screen.
Format the partition that has Vista and install XP in its place.

 

[cornedbeef007-groups]

Not sure this is the right place for this posting. We are buying Laptops with
Vista Business on them, then downgrading (or is the up) them to XP pro. This
has been going fine, but a director wanted to see vista so I booted one up
fully into the system and showed him.

Unfortunately now when I boot from the XP disk it says there are no drives
to install it on, but vista still boots without any problem.

How can I get the XP disk sot see the drive and allow me to wipe vista and
install XP?

Does your laptop have only a SATA Hard Disk? When you boot the WinXP
CD, there is no driver for the SATA disk, so WInXP can't see it!

You will need to determine what the driver file is by looking in
Hardware Manager while Visata is running, and then Slipstream the
driver into your WinXP disk.
Slipstreaming the drive is most easily accomplished with nLite
http://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html

Dual Boot adding WinXP when Vista is already installed is NOT trivial.
Do your Google research first.

Good Luck