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[stuart30]

Hope someone can help...

Ive bought a new Acer laptop which came with Vista pre installed......basicly i cant stand vista so decieded id use good old windows xp.

That is until i found out i have a sata hard drive and xp wont find the installed hard drive as i need a sata driver that needs loading in the early stages of xp.

Ive looked every where i can think of too find this blasted driver,Acer website,googled sata ect ect and no luck.

Basicly its an Acer travelmate 5320 if any one has had a similar problem or knows where to locate the driver id be extremely greatfull.

[Markjay]

All I can say is that you will need a USB floppy drive and then press F6 at the beginning of the setup, or of you want to be real clever then you can 'slipstream' the SATA driver into the XP installation CD, but you probably already know this... sorry I can't help with the actual driver, I downgraded a few laptops this week but they were all HP and the driver was available for download from HP's website.

One thing you could try if you did not erase the Vista partition yet is boot the laptop into Vista, then check in Device Manager the exact part number and model of the SATA driver chip, and run this on google....

[Nickbat]

Try here, Stuart. It seems to have millions of drivers listed.

http://list.driverguide.com/list/company17/index.html

Good luck

Nick

[Entwood]

When installing Windows XP, right at the start it says "press F6 to install additional drivers"  or something very close, it is at this point that you should insert a disc with the relevant drivers for your sata controller. The problem is finding out which controller you have ... the chipset for that laptop is .. I think Intel 960GL Express .. but I can't find which SATA controller that uses.

The most common are PROMISE and SILICON IMAGE which often install as a RAID CONTROLLER and then are not used in RAID configuration.

I have a floppy with some SATA drivers on .. if you PM me your email address I'll zip it up and send it on .. might work.. might not !!!  

[stuart30]

Thanks for the help so far guys...

[mantahatch]

Did something similar on a laptop 6 months ago, just found a setting in the BIOS needs changing and then XP loads normally.
Can't for the life me remember what the setting was, but it seemed to make sense when I was doing it.

HTH

Mike

[Golfbuddy]

I am certainly not an expert on these things, as Captain Zok will confirm after he helped me set up my home network, but I have found this which may be of help. There is a WinXP launch manager driver listed. What this does I have absolutely no idea but it sounds useful.

http://support.acer-euro.com/drivers/notebook/tm_540.html

[Weds]

Hope someone can help...

Ive bought a new Acer laptop which came with Vista pre installed......basicly i cant stand vista so decieded id use good old windows xp.

That is until i found out i have a sata hard drive and xp wont find the installed hard drive as i need a sata driver that needs loading in the early stages of xp.

Ive looked every where i can think of too find this blasted driver,Acer website,googled sata ect ect and no luck.

Basicly its an Acer travelmate 5320 if any one has had a similar problem or knows where to locate the driver id be extremely greatfull.

Which flavour of XP are you using, I think you need one with SP2 as this has SATA drivers with it..

[Markjay]

Did something similar on a laptop 6 months ago, just found a setting in the BIOS needs changing and then XP loads normally.
Can't for the life me remember what the setting was, but it seemed to make sense when I was doing it.

HTH

Mike

Change SATA controller Native mode to disabled...?

[mantahatch]

Did something similar on a laptop 6 months ago, just found a setting in the BIOS needs changing and then XP loads normally.
Can't for the life me remember what the setting was, but it seemed to make sense when I was doing it.

HTH

Mike

Change SATA controller Native mode to disabled...?

Ahh yes that sounds like what I changed, thanks for the reminder.

Mike

[stuart30]

Thanks once again guys...well ive tried the F6 load drivers but the machine insists on them being loaded via floppy which i dont have and it ignores the CD with drivers on.....so i"ll certainly try the changing the bios as suggested.

This really is becoming a major pain in the arse now,really hope a little fiddling works.

Once again many thanks for the help and advice so far  

[Markjay]

Thanks once again guys...well ive tried the F6 load drivers but the machine insists on them being loaded via floppy which i dont have and it ignores the CD with drivers on.....so i"ll certainly try the changing the bios as suggested.

This really is becoming a major pain in the arse now,really hope a little fiddling works.

Once again many thanks for the help and advice so far  

If the you can't get the driver to work of the original installation CD, then you must use a floppy - not CD, USB memory etc.... (these are only supported in Vista).

[stuart30]

Thanks once again guys...well ive tried the F6 load drivers but the machine insists on them being loaded via floppy which i dont have and it ignores the CD with drivers on.....so i"ll certainly try the changing the bios as suggested.

This really is becoming a major pain in the arse now,really hope a little fiddling works.

Once again many thanks for the help and advice so far  

If the you can't get the driver to work of the original installation CD, then you must use a floppy - not CD, USB memory etc.... (these are only supported in Vista).


Ok so what if your machine doesnt have a floppy drive...surely they cant be selling laptops that cant be down graded to XP from vista.... :-?

[Martin_1962]

Upgraded to XP not Downgraded

[Kevin Wood]

My new PC at work has a SATA drive and no floppy. Does this mean I can't re-install XP without this aggro? (actually I'd hope the OEM copy of XP includes the drivers).

I think it's rather shocking that an OS comes without the capability to access any storage media invented after the 1980's.

Do you think we could put the driver on a cassette and load it through the sound card? Or maybe it supports punch tape?

 

Kevin