Tech Olive

If you’ve been following me on Twitter (which you should), then you’ll know that a few weeks ago I tried my hands at installing Mac OS X on my HP laptop. To a certain extent, I was successful, but had numerous issues once I booted to the desktop such as no wireless, no proper resolutions and my touchpad wouldn’t fully work. I had solutions for all these problems, but I decided that it was more trouble than it was worth, so I did what any unmotivated geek would do and simply gave up.

After finding out that Mac OS X hated me and I it, I felt that I should still search for a project to do with my laptop. So I decided to see if I could rid my HP device of evil spirits Windows Vista and run XP on it instead. This would make both my laptop and I extremely happy.

You might be asking why installing such a simple OS on a normal PC would be a “project.” Most OEM computers today come with Windows Vista pre-installed on them. They also don’t include any other drivers on the machines other than Vista drivers, which means that XP SATA drivers for the hard drive are absent. So, normally when you insert an XP disc into the disc drive, your OEM Vista PC will say something like, “hard drive not found.” There’s a simple solution to this and it turned out to be quite a simple task. All I had to do was locate SATA drivers for my HP laptop specific to the model number and then merge those drivers onto a Windows XP install disc using a piece of software known as nLite.

A quick note before I show you how to do this. My laptop is an HP Pavilion DV6700SE, which means the SATA drivers that I use may not necessarily work with your laptop or PC, but mine will most likely work with the whole line of DV6xxx laptops, so try it at your own risk. It’ll be your responsibility to locate your own SATA drivers (and any other needed drivers) for your own device. Oh, and also, I am not responsible if you screw up your machine by doing this task.

The things you’ll need for this tutorial are as follows:

- Windows XP Install Disc (SP2 or below. Don’t use one with SP3)
- nLite, which can be downloaded here.
- SATA drivers. I found mine right here.
- Blank CD
- CD Burner

1. Download nLite (link provided above) and install it.

2. Download and install the SATA drivers. For mine, the install directory is C:\swsetup\SP37005.

3. Insert the Windows XP Installation Disc.

4. Open up nLite and once you get to the Locating the Windows Installation screen, click Browse.

5. Click on the CD Drive where the XP install disc is located. Click OK.

6. Next, nLite will ask you where to save the CD installation files for modification, click OK.

7. A smaller window will pop up asking where to save to and work from. Click Make New Folder and type in a folder name and save it to the desktop (or wherever most convenient). Click OK.

8. nLite will now copy the data from the XP install disc to the folder you just made. Once it’s done, click Next. We don’t need to do anything on the Presents screen so click Next.

9. Once you arrive to the Task Selection screen, select the Drivers and Bootable ISO options. Click Next.

10. We’ll now select our SATA drivers to include with the new install disc. Click Insert then select Single Driver. Browse to the directory where we installed the SATA drivers, which was C:\swsetup\SP37005.  Open up the Files folder and select iastor.inf. Click Open. (This step will vary based on what laptop and SATA drivers you have.)

11. Now, highlight and select ALL of the files listed. Also make sure that Textmode driver is selected. Click OK.

12. nLite will ask you if you want to start the process, click Yes.

13. Once the process is finished, click Next.

14. You’re now at the Bootable ISO screen. This is where we’ll want to remove the XP install disc from our drive and insert a blank CD. Back to nLite: Under Mode, select Direct Burn. All other settings can be adjusted based on your preference. After you’re done, click Next.

15. Insert your newly created XP install disc into your pre-installed Vista machine and boot from it. It should now proceed to install Windows XP. You’ll probably want to get various other drivers as well so your PC will work properly with Windows XP.

That should be all! If you have issues or questions, I can help you as much as I can, but there’s no guarantees that I’ll be able to pin point a specific issue.