Laptops XP on SONY Viao

K

koolkart

Disciple
my cousin recently got a sony viao VGN-NR160E laptop from the US.
it came with windows vista home premium originally...but he wants to install windows XP on it. The problem is when i insert a bootable XP cd and boot from the cd...after the initial loading of files, i get an erroe saying that windows setup does not detect a primary hard drive. what am i supposed to do.....is it possible to install XP on a laptop that came preloaded with original VISTA...how doi install XP the laptop...btw it has a 160 GB hard disk with 1 GB RAM.plzzz help.thanks all
 
First visit notebookreview.com forums for info on how to install XP on that particular Sony notebook.

You are probably not able to install XP because the drive is in ahci mode in the bios, you will have to load the hdd drivers before XP install starts when it gives you the prompt to load third party drivers.
 
I presume the hdd you have is a SATA drive

XP by default does not load sata drivers at setup time so you need to slipstream sata drivers on the installation cd using nlite

google for "slipstream sata drivers on xp" for step by step instuictions
 
thanks all..but the problem is he messed up with the original vista premium installation and has formatted the hard disk using an *ahem* DELL OEM copy of VISTA ultimate....now the he has lost original visat premium installation...is there any way to recover the original installation using sony recovery feature......can anybody plzz post the links to the website....AND also where can i find the SD card driver for the laptop model VGN-NR160E
 
Why would he install dell on this. Anyway. Since the recovery partition is gone if you want to restore the notebook to factory condition then you have 2 choices: look out for someone with the same laptop model and beg him for a copy of the recovery dvd's or buy recovery disks from Sony for about 15-20 pounds, don't know much it is here. You could also go to a vaio showroom in your city and ask them to allow you to make recovery disks.

Or if you are not particularly concerned about restoring to factory condition in terms of OS, then just install Vista or XP afresh on the laptop, drivers for the model will be available at Sony online. As a temporary workaround you can install XP or Vista by setting sata as ide in bios as opposed to ahci and then install the hdd ahci drivers later, you will have to visit the link I provided earlier for more details and comprehensive help on how to do this for the particular model.
 
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