Windows Vista Home Premium and XP Home Edition

[Matthew Armshaw]

I have been trying to dual boot a Gateway Laptop with Vista Home Premium 32
bit and XP Home edition. One tutorial instructed me to partition the drive
from Vista desktop(which I did), boot the cpu with the XP disk in the CD/DVD
drive which I also did.

XP started moving the pre-installation files to the CPU, and when the nice
blue screen came up asking to Install Windows XP I pressed ENTER. However,
instead of getting the screen that would stay Install Windows XP on a
particular partition I received the message:

Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer.

Make sure any hard disk drives are powered on and properly connected to
your
computer, and that any disk-related hardware configuration is correct.
This may
involve running a manufactured-supplied diagnostic or setup program

Setup cannot continue.

The rest of the tutorial went on to fix the bootloader and create a screen
to choose between the operating systems on boot. It all seemed very logical.

I thought maybe the issue was with the CPU not wanting to dual-boot or that
the Vista version was a Home product rather than Office or Professional? Any
suggestions?

Thanks,
Matt

 

[Mick Murphy]

http://apcmag.com/how_to_dual_boot_vista_and_xp_with_vista_installed_first__the_stepbystep_guide.htm

The above site seems to be the way to go.

 

[Jane C]

I have been trying to dual boot a Gateway Laptop with Vista Home Premium 32
bit and XP Home edition. One tutorial instructed me to partition the drive
from Vista desktop(which I did), boot the cpu with the XP disk in the
CD/DVD
drive which I also did.

XP started moving the pre-installation files to the CPU, and when the nice
blue screen came up asking to Install Windows XP I pressed ENTER. However,
instead of getting the screen that would stay Install Windows XP on a
particular partition I received the message:

Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer.

Make sure any hard disk drives are powered on and properly connected to
your
computer, and that any disk-related hardware configuration is correct.
This may
involve running a manufactured-supplied diagnostic or setup program

Setup cannot continue.

The rest of the tutorial went on to fix the bootloader and create a screen
to choose between the operating systems on boot. It all seemed very
logical.

I thought maybe the issue was with the CPU not wanting to dual-boot or
that
the Vista version was a Home product rather than Office or Professional?
Any
suggestions?

Thanks,
Matt

Hello Matt,

The problem that you have is that most recent laptops use SATA hard drives
on a SATA controller. XP has no inbuilt support for SATA controllers, so
you will need the controller drivers on a floppy disc (F6 to load drivers)
during the XP install. You will need an external floppy drive (a USB floppy
drive should work). Unfortunately, XP can only load drivers from a floppy
disc.