nardox

I have a Toshiba Qosmio F40 laptop with Vista preinstalled when I bought it, it have SATA HDD and there is no option in the latest BIOS to set the HDD to IDE mode.

The only XP installation CD I have is a XP Pro SP2 that I bought from school, I tried but it always say that HDD can not be find when I boot from that CD.

Are there anyway to solve this problem and put XP Pro on the Qosmio F40 that I have? I really can't stand Vista anymore since the very unstable wireless and slow system....and yes I have all the latest update installed...(my ping was jumping between 40 something to 250ish last night when I was playing CS...)

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warensemble

go to their website, lookup the model in downloads, and look for a sata controller driver disk creator. What it will do is create a floppy with the drivers to see your hard drive. During the xp installation process early on (as soon as you get a big blue screen) hit F6 to load it. You will see a message at the bottom of setup that tells you to do this.

blupupher

Exactly. I had to do this for my dads Gateway.
Only problem was I had no external floppy drive and it would not read it off the USB.
I solved this by using nlite to make a new disk with the drivers on the disk and it did it automatically.

edit: just took a look around Toshibas site, I don't see a driver for this? Maybe it is called something different?Try googling it and see if other have had luck finding it.
I wonder if you could hit F6, then take the XP disk out and put the Vista disk in to get the SATA drivers?

2nd edit: This may be it

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scottb75

Yeah, I had the same problem with my cousins Toshiba Satellite though we still cannot find the proper SATA drivers for it, so we installed using compatability mode.

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justarealguy

Either slipstream it to the XP install file (the drivers ) or get a usb floppy and F6 it.

Your bios might have an IDE mode for Hard Drive configuration, (it might be called compatability mode), you can avoid the driver install with this mode.

You lose a bit of performance though.

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ounderfla69

Toshiba sucks for supplying drivers for XP for machines that were loaded with Vista and the is no compatibility mode in there bios. If you still have Vista on it you should be able to go into the device manager and determine what Sata controller is built into the laptop. Then you can go to the manufacture site, probably Intel, and download the correct XP driver.