Installing Windows XP on a Vista Computer?

Question

Alright so, I'm a pretty technologically competent guy, but i've had some trouble here. I know how to install an OS, so I put in the disc and booted off of it, but it says it can't find any drives on my Toshiba Portege M400 Laptop. It says that I can load the drivers with a floppy disc, but I don't have a floppy drive so I can't do that. Then i was thinking since there is a setup.exe on the XP cd i could start the install from within windows and let it run from there, but the XP installers recodnizes that my current OS is newer than the one on the CD. So two questions: Can I load the drivers from a flash drive instead of a floppy drive? And/Or Can i change a build number from within my Vista to make the CD think I have a lower version of windows?

P.S. I tried NLite and it didn't work

Answer 1

The problem is XP cannot read a SATA hard drive without getting drivers for ACHI. The other work around that desktops have is in bios changing the SATA setting to native IDE, then xp will see the hard drive as an IDE drive...

On a laptop, you can go into bios and check, but I don't think you will have that option in bios. There is a way to make an xp disc with the drivers for ACHI on the OS disk by burning the files to another disc...

Answer 2

sure you may setting up xp on a vista laptop as long as you will come across each and every of the xp version drivers on your mom board and instruments. in many situations the computing device producer's internet site is a robust place to start up searching for the drivers on your computing device which will paintings with xp.

Answer 3

I'm assuming you have the XP disc.



This is a very useful guide, but I'm warning you its rather long but effective. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2287685,00.asp



"Downgrading" from Vista to XP is a bit of a chore: I tried it once and it wound up screwing my computer up some, mostly because the drivers were removed and I had difficulty getting them back even with proper software. If you can bare with it a while longer and wait for Windows 7 (which I may point out has already crushed Vista in its beta stages).

Answer 4

It needs its own partition or a separate drive



Vista is an update of XP (Yea right) just like XP was an update of '98

Answer 5

get the drivers, and install from the flash..