computer troubles...

[niglett]

hello everyone and good morning/noon/afternoon/night/early morning. where ever you live or are.

i need to dual boot my laptop computer and i'm having issues firstly ill let you understand what i'm working with.

my laptop has
-4GB ram
-dual core 2.1GHz processor
-250GB SATA HDD the serial code is WD2500BEVT
-1 dvd rw drive
i currently run windows 7 professional. i want to install windows XP in a septate partition on the same Drive. the issue is XP wont recognize the SATA drive on its own. I don't have the driver because Western digital and staples are lame. and of course i have valid copies of both Operating systems.

when trying to install XP it gets to the windows is preparing to install and then blue screens.

if i can at least get the driver i need i would be happy.

 

[DeadlyYellow]

Eh. You probably already seen this.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

You will be required to load your SATA controller driver before the install. The problem is not that you cannot read the drive but rather than the installer cannot interface with the controller that runs the drive. I do not recall if the XP installer can use a USB stick - it may actually require a floppy. Generally, if you ignore this step and the default SATA controller driver does not work, you get a blue screen with a stop 0x000007b error indicating some problem with the disc. You will also likely run into a problem beyond this if you get the driver installed and that is the fact that XP does not have a built in way to add a partition that I've ever found. You can of course partition during the install, but this only works if you delete the current partion information (which reults in the loss of the data on the drive).

You may want to consider virtualization. Depending on what you want to run it might be the better option. I myself have an XP, 98 and DOS virtual machine on this system in order to ensure I can play my entire library of games.

 

[niglett]

yea i ran a few virtual machines before but it didn't quite cut it out.

 

[niglett]

Eh. You probably already seen this.

yea i've seen it before but they dont supply drivers for internal drives