i am trying to downgrade from vista to xp, but when i put in the xp disc to reformat, the system replies no hard disk. If i relaunch vista the hard disk still works. Is there a way how i can rid of the vista?

Hi there! When does it give you the message that there is no hard drive ? Are you booting from your Xp cd?? I would suggest you do this as from in windows vista!! Is it a sata or ide drive??

yes i am trying to format from the xp cd. As regards to the hard disk i am not sure if it is sata or ide. how can i check it? thank you

ok so normally when you try and setup from the xp cd and you have a sata disk, the setup wil tell you that it can not find a hdd on the system,so do you actually get to the pointwhere it does ask you to format or do you never reach that point of the setup?if you do not then you most likely do have a sata drive!Please give us the model number of the system!(desktop or laptop) so that i can check and c what oi can find out on my side!! But lets say you do have n desktop witch will make this process much easier, find the make of the motherboard and go to the site of the manufacturer under downloads and your model, there you should find a sata driver.! This driver is small(small enough to fit on a floppy) so it should be easy to spot, download this and copy it to a floppy or cd(unzip, never done it with a cd so try floppy first)!then when you start the xp setupas the blue screen start you will see that it tells you to press f6 to load sata drivers,press this as prompted,and follow the instructions,then continue with the setup, it should then go through to the installing a new Windows and then the format screen!!

the laptop is an hp 530, and it does not have a floppy drive obviously, can i use a pen drive, for the driver inquestion.

i am not sure but you can always try ans see what happens, i have checked a lot of sites and forums and this method looks to be the best way, http://news.softpedia.com/news/Insta...F6-47807.shtml

if you follow this very carefully and do what they tell you to then this will work 100% , i do not have a laptop with a sata drive so ican not test this my self but i do use the NLITE software to make unattended windows cd's, i really hope this will help you witch i do believe it will!!

I0ki's advice is perfect and I am not saying to stray from that, just a side note though, if you have a cd burner on your laptop. You can create an image of the floppy files, burn them onto cd and boot from cd, but even a laptop without a floppy drive will read the cd as a floppy. I have recently done this working on a laptop that I needed to load some system32 files on. Just a side note I thought I would add.

Can we not change the Controller to IDE from the BIOS. I tried it and it worked. But I am not sure if we can switch back to Sata Controller.

you could switch it back but then xp wouldnt work

Oh drat! I switched back to RAID and neither does XP nor Vista works.
I had to run the start-up repair using the Vista DVD to fix Vista.