I wonder...Did you buy an oem version of vista? Newer vista - made computers have hardware components that can only interact with vista itself. For 'normal' drivers like video or sound card drivers, these can be modified and hard loaded. But I don't know if it is possible to do this with your hard drive.

Maybe someone with more technical expertise can help :p.

you have to go into the bios and look for a setting like 'configure sata as' or something in that line and set it to 'IDE' before you restart and go into the xp setup,its probably set to 'AHCI' now...XP doesn't support AHCI natively so thats why its giving you such a headache lol

yeah XP doesnt support full native SATA as it didnt exist when xp came out

put your disk/motherboard drivers on a floppy and hit F6 when the option appears during the blue part of xp startup.

alternatively look into slipstreaming them using a tool called Nlite

ah kewl find i was hoping of slipsteaming my raid drivers to da xp cd cuz i don't have a floppy drive..

yeah use Nlite for that

amazing wut you'll run into if you're at da right place at da right time
thanx man

yeah nlite can also integrate stuff like IE7, WMP11, and (when it is released in under a week), windows xp sp3

ya but it says that to do that you have to use a copy with no service packs on...da one i got has sp2 in it,any ideas?

thats fine

i used my sp2 disk and it was ok for putting drivers, ie7, media player 11 on. Even worked fine with Sp3 beta.