Vista Downgrade to XP

J

jack76son

New Member
Hello, let me thank everyone in advance for reading and offering any advice.

This is how my situation started. A buddys vista - based Compaq v6402ca was toast. I used a virtual environment disk to save his pics / tunes etc. I was going to repair the vista installation using his recovery disk. However the disk is only in french. So i went on the HP / Compaq site, and if i was to order a recovery disk from there, they only offer the french one as well. So i get the idea to install xp on there without thinking (or reading these forums) and find that its not so easy to do.

Heres where i'm at.

i find this forum on hp's site - hxxp://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-PCs-Pavilions-Presario/Downgrading-vista-to-xp-on-compaq-v6402ca/m-p/855994

Which tells me to get the xp rated drivers from this page - hxxp://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareCategory?lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&os=228&product=3224055#N655
(which i'm working on, but i have the chipset driver ready, as well as the audio ones ready to go, and a few others - good enough to get me started while the rest are downloading)

So i start loading xp, and now i'm getting all kinds of errors - ntldr missing, winsrv not found, it seems each time i install, a new problem occurs. But if i use that same install disk on an older xp machine i can play with, everything fires up well.

1st question - how do i load these new drivers? (i've tried an A drive with the chipset driver and pushed f6 while loading, but it doesnt recognize the .exe driver on the old floppy), and i tried copying it to a cd, but dont see the option to load drivers from it.

I'm sure i'll have many more questions along the way, and if you need some more information, i'll do what i can to provide it.

thx
jack76son

P.S - i'm not overly computer - saavy, so if you could make the replies in laymans terms, i'd appreciate it.
 
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a downgrade is a clean install essentially... its just legal mumbo jumbo

you are trying to load 3rd party drivers as if you had a raid controller or something do you have one? you dont load chipset drivers here. you will install XP as normal provide it with an XP license key (not vista) and then once XP is installed then install the missing drivers.

you might have to change your hard drive setting in the bios to IDE mode instead of sata... ive noticed that when trying to install XP on newer computers.
 
Ok, how do i change that in the bios .... i push f10 to enter the bios, i have an option to change "Sata native support" off ... but do i have to enable IDE somewhere? i dont see that option.

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but as i stated, i'm not anywhere near the proficiency level many of you are.

Thx,
jack76son
 
every bios is different i usually seen it say something like ide compatability or something like that... it would be in the hdd settings you can always try that sata native support to off and see if that works if it doesnt just switch it back.
 
I would run a diagnostic on the hard drive. If the XP setup is able to get the point where it's actually installing, then there isn't a driver problem. The only drivers that might need to be installed before setup would be for storage, but if the XP install detects your hard drive fine then that isn't the issue. All the other drivers are installed after XP is fully installed.
 
PohTayToez - i was screwing around with it yesterday, and i decided to do a good old chkdsk /r, it took over 9 hrs to do its thing, so i think that was the problem. I had to use the french vista disk to access dos commands, so i need to do some google translating to see what it actually did, but there was a pile of problems. I have a busy day at work today, so i'm going to start from scratch with the install again, and see if that was the main cause.

Thx everybody, i'll post some more questions or mark as solved when i get more done.
 
I ran the chkdsk/r dos utility yesterday, and the results were in french and internet went down so i couldnt translate it. after it was complete, i formatted c: to do a clean install, then for $hits and giggles i did another chkdsk/r. The 2nd one took far longer, i'm guessing 13-14hrs (rather than 9ish before) and gave me these results:

chkdsk is verifying files
64 file records processed
file verification completed
0 large file records processed
0 bad file records processed
0 EA records processed
0 reparse records processed
chkdsk is verifying indexes
161 index entries processed
index verification completed
5 unindexed files processed
chkdsk is verifying security descriptors
64 security descriptors processed
security descriptor verification completed
9 data files processed
chkdsk is verifying file data
Windows replaced bad clusters in file 34
of name \$Extend\$RmMetadata\$TxfLog\$Txflow~2.
48 files processed
File data verification completed.
chkdsk is verifying free space (this is the portion that took forever to do - sat at 10-16% for over 8 hrs while i was watching it, then gave up and went to bed)
37257794 free clusters processed
free space verification is complete
Adding 27042 bad clusters in the Bad Clusters File
Correcting errors in the Master File Table (MFT) BITMAP attribute
correcting errors in the volume bitmap
Windows has made corrections to the file system

149123330 KB Total Disk Space
21568 KB in 5 files
8KB in 11 indexes
108168KB in bad sectors
70574 KB in use by the system
65536 KB occupied by the log file
148923012 KB available on disk

Something doesnt seem right to me. if chkdsk was done previously, then formatted, and redone showing errors, is this an indication of something wrong with the hard drive itself? Any ideas?

thx jack76son
 
You have lots of bad sectors on the drive. You will need to replace the drive and do a fresh install of windows. You have an operating system install cd to reinstall on the new drive?
 
The operating system disks i have, no prob there. Glad that (with all the help of course) i finally figured out what was going on - i was sure that it was some conflict with sata / ata and xp vs vista.

This is for a friend who just had a baby - so theres not a lot of spare cash on hand. Now i realize there is some grey area here, but how much do you guess a new hard drive would cost for them? Also any hints on what kind to look for, i started snooping a bit, and found all kinds of hard drives, different cache sizes, etc.

Thanks to everyone that helped me, much appreciated. I learned quite a bit by screwing around with this, never seen any hard drive issues before.

jack76son
 
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This is the website of a store that i've been to a few times, and treated me pretty good. Would any of these work in that laptop?

hxxp://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/Computers%28ME%29/ComputerComponents%28ME%29/HardDrives%28ME%29/NotebookHardDrives%28ME%29/Default.aspx

thx
 
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