laptop hard drive swap problem

**Egren71** · 8 December, 2010, 01:19

Hard drive Swap Problem

Hello
This may or may not be of any help, but when i put XP on a Vista Laptop i had to find a driver for the hard drive controller on my motherboard.
The reason for this is that when XP was released the version of motherboard that you are using wasn't released and therefore Microsoft couldn't bundle the drivers it needs into the XP disk.
There is a point in the XP install where it says "press F6 to install additional drivers " or something like that and it is at that point that you supply the drivers for your hard drive controller.
Two problems you may have are
1. XP only looks for drivers from Floppy drive
2. Some manufacturers won't supply XP drivers for Laptops they supplied with Vista on
The solutions for these problems are not easy.
For a floppy try to beg or borrow a USB one as it is probably not worth buying one. There are other ways around this problem but they are all more complex.
For the drivers, in my case i found a website that listed a compatible driver that worked. But some of the compatible drivers don't work 100%

Also sometimes one manufacturers distribution of XP won't run on another manufacturers hardware.

There is another way of getting your pictures off the drive using Linux live CD's if you cannot resolve your problem.

I hope this answer has been of some help to you.
Good Luck

**dasteph** · 8 December, 2010, 09:17

Originally posted by pantomime horse

trying to fix my old aunties laptop for her
its a hp pavillion dv 6000 which was running vista
the hard drive that was in it was a western digital 160 gb but this totally died
I had an older acer laptop running vista so I put this into the pavillion.
I know that it wont load up vista but I thought I could load xp into it
problem is when I run diagnostic check through bios the new hard drive is fine but trying to install xp it goes so far then tells me there is no hard drive
the xp disk is an official copy I got a few years ago with a dell desktop and I have used it in a few other desktops so I know that is fine

any clues cos I am really banging my head against a wall here
I'm not a novice with pc's having built 7 or 8 of them over the years but I'm really flumoxed with this
any ideas at all no matter how trivial will be much appreciated
and I dont want to wipe the harddrive totally as I may have some photos on it that aren't backed up
thanks folks

what type of drive ide or sata, if it was ide i would of thought it would load as normal, if sata you will need third party drivers in order to load the o/s which is possibly why it cannot find the drive.

having looked at your post again i see you state that you do not want to format the drive totally, but in order to load xp with vista already in place it would be a downgrade which is not possible.
the only way to load xp would be a total format and then a clean install correct me if i am wrong.

**Salami** · 8 December, 2010, 13:27

Originally posted by pantomime horse

trying to fix my old aunties laptop for her
its a hp pavillion dv 6000 which was running vista
the hard drive that was in it was a western digital 160 gb but this totally died
I had an older acer laptop running vista so I put this into the pavillion.
I know that it wont load up vista but I thought I could load xp into it
problem is when I run diagnostic check through bios the new hard drive is fine but trying to install xp it goes so far then tells me there is no hard drive
the xp disk is an official copy I got a few years ago with a dell desktop and I have used it in a few other desktops so I know that is fine

any clues cos I am really banging my head against a wall here
I'm not a novice with pc's having built 7 or 8 of them over the years but I'm really flumoxed with this
any ideas at all no matter how trivial will be much appreciated
and I dont want to wipe the harddrive totally as I may have some photos on it that aren't backed up
thanks folks

here is a rescue solution for your Aunt laptop that was based on VISTA OS. All laptops running window VISTA or 7 has SATA HDD.

Buy USB2 2.5" external SATA hard drive case for maximum of ?4 from ebay it is not a waste cause it will be used in the future.

1) You will need some repair software that has HDD CLONING I recommend "5Plus Boot CD". This 5Plus boot cd runs from within the CD no installation needed.

2) You will need a PC or laptop to perform cloning faulty HDD and before you start Create a folder name it "Aunt" just to keep stuff tidy.

3) Put the old hard drive in the new 2.5" sata external hard drive case and connect to PC or laptop.

3) Run the "5Plus boot CD and choose Clone from "X" letter will be the damaged hard drive in this case will be your Aunts HDD. (Local drive C) Partition and if there is (DATA Backup) Partition to the folder you named "Aunt"

4) Make sure you disconnect the 2.5" sata external case from PC or laptop properly don't just pull the USB connection. Now take the faulty hard drive from the external case and replace it with the new formatted hard drive and connect to PC or laptop with folder "Aunt" open this folder and copy all it's content to new hard drive and that is you.
install the hard drive to your aunt laptop and start surfing again.

I hope this tut will help you and please let us how you getting on? Good luck Salami.

P.S; if you can't find "5Plus Boot CD" look for cloning hard drive software in Linux free ware.

laptop hard drive swap problem

laptop hard drive swap problem

Comment

Comment

Comment