I just got my new laptop, and I gotta remove this hideous windows vista. I tried just putting the CD in and waiting till I get to the part where I agree and press F8, delet all the stuff and put my lovely winxp. Problem is that where I start from the CD and the things load from the CD, right before I'm supposed to get in the setup I get a blue screen of death. (like the one you get when u bench ur unstable cpu). I read some stuff online and it seems that I can't downgrade the OS like this. So. I have to format the sucker first. Problem is, I don't have a floppy to use Partition Magic on it. Any other way to format this laptop?

EDIT: It might work if I had a vista CD that I could use and format it but I don't.

do you have another computer you can connect the drive to?

or maybe try http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd

..you could torrent a vista/7 disc, burn, and format, then install xp

however, i downgraded my laptop to XP, and did it fine through the xp disc...

Ya I have the PC that I'm using and the laptop. I gotta find a way to format it. Partition Magic uses 2 floppies I think...so I don't wanna waste 2 CD's in my case, as I also have only 1 usb drive. Unless they got some new partition magic that is on only 1 medium...not gonna work.

Strange...Idk why I get the blue screen then....this sux. Also I'm on a stupid limited 30GB download and upload per month so I can't download OS's

empty

somebody you know has have to have a laptop that came with vista... or a dell or something...

Nope...no one.

Isn't there a formating software that works like partition magic, so I can put it on my flash drive and use it?

I think I can try to use 1 flash drive the followng way: I find my partition magic floppy discs (or download it).
Put 1st part on the flash and plug it in the laptop.
When asked to put the 2nd part, I disconnect the flash, put in the PC and replace the 1st part with the 2nd part, and plug it back in the laptop. That way it will look as if it was 2 different things.

I'll try that tomorrow. Now it's time to go to bed.

You can go Here for a simple formatter.
Download the bootable iso and burn that to a cd or something. It does take a while though because it erases your entire hard drive.

http://software.lsoft.net/boot-cd-iso.zip (download link)
http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm (website)

Is this what your looking for?

all the xp install cd's i have had, has the option to format drives at the screen where you select which drive to install on initially

does it allow you to use deltree / dos command formats in the windows recovery console?

you need to make sure your laptop is compatible with XP, most newer ones aren't. I couldn't even install XP on my laptop, I installed XP onto my bare laptop drive then put it in there and it wouldn't boot. works great with Vista/7

why not just put windows 7 on it?? why bother with "hideous" XP?? (judging by your bad experience with vista, I'd say you have a cheaper processors and <2GB of ram)

If you're getting a BSOD you aren't going to installing XP. Formatting isn't going to fix that.


Vista and 7 both run fine on "underpowered" hardware, I've got 7 on my EeePC and I don't think you'll find anyone calling that a powerhouse.

mainly vista , under 2GB I know it runs pretty bad (or did, since I haven't seen any computers with less than 2GB ram lately AND running Vista older than SP1). I assume your vista was updated??

All vista needs to be happy is 4GB of ram, just like all Mac OS needs to be happy is a good processor.

Windows 7 is Vista with spunk and flair. I like both though

Vista is fine with 2GB of RAM.

I only used it up while playing Call of Duty though

4GB is optimal though IMHO, and assuredly is easy enough to add into a laptop that cannot run vista well

I ran Vista for a while on my EeePC and it was fine with 1 GB. It wouldn't be something you would want to game on but it actually didn't get much snappier with 2 GB versus 1 GB.

The need for a lot of RAM in Vista/7 is just an oft-repeated misnomer.

2.1G 2GB ram so laptop is good...vista is bad. I don't know anything about it (don't wanna know) Just want to get XP on it.

I don't see why if windows vista runs, xp wouldn't since vista requires more resources. I just don't see a logical explanation. In the specs it doesn't say that it's not compatible nor does it say that it is. In fact it doesn't say anything except that it comes with vista home premium.

It's new hardware that's not supported in XP. There's really not much more to it.


Why do you have such an aversion to Vista if you've never even used it? I've never understood such thinking.

I can set up XP much faster and better than I would vista. DAMN! There must be a way to make it compatible. Is there?

If the drivers aren't there you're just wasting time. You don't need to "set up" Vista short of installing a few drivers...but how would you know if you've never done it?

I pwn! I thought that this might have something to do with the hard disk so I went in the bios and saw a sata option. Changed it from something to "Compatible" and now my xp cd works fine.

You turned off AHCI. That pretty much kills HDD performance.

Whatever, go to XP if you want. I don't understand why you wouldn't at least give Vista a try.

I actually did give it a 15 minute try yesterday...I couldn't find the Add/Remove programs menu nor could I navigate in vista as I would in XP. What I did find though...were 44(well not all 44 were but most) useless processes running on start up which kinda killed vista's chances on being an os that I would ever consider putting on any of my computers.

I'd even go to windows 98 if games didn't have a minimum req. of win xp. I love old programs. Simply perfect, so little things that could go wrong, so much ram and speed left for applications.

That makes no sense...do you have any idea what any of them do? How do you know they are useless? Why is less better (I'll give you a hint, it's not always better)?

As for removing programs...Start -> Control Panel -> Programs and Features.


Added to that, Vista and 7 are faster for gaming with a decent GPU.

I bet they are. Sure if you buy a 10k$ rig, oc with liquid nitrogen all components to kingdom come...maybe it will be a little faster than my PC...I still don't like it though. rofl

Anyway, I found the solution to my problem which this thread was originally intended for. WinXP vs. Windows Vista can be in another thread. (not gonna be mine though)

↑ What does this do?

My bet is (the not being able to install XP) is that your XP install disk is the original unpatched release. You need SP1 or SP2 to install XP if you have PCIe video cards or you'll get that BSOD every time it loads PCI.SYS if my memory serves me correctly. If you can slipstream SP1 or SP2 you shouldn't run into any further problems. I had this problem a few weeks ago building a rig that was to use a Vista upgrade disk. Luckily I had two XP install disks - an unpatched one (failed with a BSOD) and one with SP1 which worked.

I fixed it dude...i posted it like 30mins ago. I changed sata mode to compatible, and now I'm putting sp3 on.

You don't need a super-fast rig to see it.


It's the Advanced Host Controller Interface. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Host...oller_Interface

Native command queuing is probably the biggest benefit.

I have no problem with stopping the AHCI. It's probably not gonna have a significant difference anyway. I'm not gonna use this laptop as a server.
Anyway, I'll see when I install the windows if it would still bsod if I put it back to AHCI.

You'll probably have to install a driver before turning it back on.

what kind?

I can't find any drivers for the laptop...I don't see the model anywhere in google that is supported and has drivers.
Some help in finding the drivers for Toshiba Satellite L300D-06N would be nice...I hope there are some left on the internet...my laptop didn't come with a cd. It also has no internet right now (because I need drivers for it) and I can't even use that stupid driver robot thing that everyone is putting on their web pages. (even ATI T_T)

according to toshiba, no such model exists

all they have is

L300D-ST3501
L300D-ST3503

(and glad you got vista working good on your netbook there Waco, I must still be living in the days of pre SP1. You do know that I love vista though. I'm not knocking it, just saying that 4GB can muscle through anything.)

And ballist1x....I hope you know that the reason windows uses so much ram is that it prepares alot of programs so that they open faster. (the most frequently used ones)

I acutally got XP working, not vista. As for the model... i dunno but here is what I got:

http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/proddetai...amp;catid=25315


It might be possible to use drivers for anothoer toshiba, for mine but I'm not sure which.

yeah I don't see why it'd be a problem if they have the same hardware. But just make sure they do. I just didn't see that specific model on their support site.

Glad you got your ancient lover back, enjoy it

Ha ha thanks. I don't know how to find out what software each driver for each toshiba has though...also this driver bot is annoying..and I can't download anything.

to the driver bot, you don't know what hardware you have??
just know what kind of wireless card, chipset, videocard, card reader, touchpad, and soundcard you have. (missing vista yet??)
you should have taken note back in vista what all your hardware was so you could locate compatible drivers.

Good to hear it worked out for ya.

I had a similar problem when I tried to install XP on my HP HDX 18t.

I had to slip stream the SATA drivers into a XP DVD to get XP to install.

why oh why does everyone jump through hoops for XP to work lol.

I have several audio programs that don't work well on vista.

have you tried windows 7?? really it's not vista's fault, clearly it's the programs being old

Lolz got it all working....sound isn't as good as on my PC, but thats to be expected unless they managed to put a razer ac-1 inside lol.

Now I gotta figure out how to lower the brightness....FN+Brightness keys doesn't work....although all the keys work independently...when I try and do Fn+Brightness up or down, nothing happens.

I personally don't use XP anymore its been about a year and a half since I used it as my main OS on all my computers.

I actually have a W7/XP dual boot on my laptop the only reason XP is installed is because some of my college classes require it.

XP is not even fully supported on my HP because there are no drivers for the blueray drive meaning blue rays won't work. There are not drivers for the Blue tooth or quick launch buttons and some settings like adv power saver are not support with XP drivers.

...Copy/Pasted one of my posts from another forum from when i 'upgraded' a new laptop to xp for one of the sales managers here.

Took me a lot of tinkering.

Post subject: Re: upgrading to xp

Posted: Thu Jul 30, 2009 11:17 am

If anybody is interested, i got this done...

There seemed to be a bug with the windows XP setup utility in that if I slipstreamed textmode drivers, i couldnt slipstream the PNP ones, and vice versa...So first instinct is to Slipstream PNP Drivers on one disk, and testmode on the others? Wrong - This wont work as the drivers are copied over during textmode and you can just do the old switcheroo when setup is about to start because it regularly checks the textmode driver (maybe it doesnt load it into memory...)

So...

What i did was...

1) Slipstream the Textmode Drivers and;
2) run setup as normal.
2a) Immediately following reboot, HDD into another PC and copy the PNP drivers to a directory on the HDD
2b) then continue as per usual...
3) Wait for unattended setup to fail due to hardware ID and manually supply a CD Key
4) fire up the device manager through cmd.exe - this threw an error asking me to run a regsvr32 but after running that all is ok.
4a) In device manager find the correct "PCI Device" (Based on Vendor and Device ID's) and although device manager told me that the drivers were installed pending reboot, i updated them and told the machine to look in the folder where i placed the PNP drivers...

Then let setup finish, crossed my fingers and as the PC rebooted i started to get annoyed expecting it to not work...but fscking woah...Welcome to windows XP....


As a hint. Look into nlite.
You don't want to be running in SATA High compatability mode. Thats like awesomesauce for nubcakes

I had similar problems with my hp laptop and my current desktop!!
I did manage to get ahci working after installation..

Anyways i have been through quite some downgrades and have found that some vista drivers do the job on xp.. The fn issue is due to missing 'quick launch' (hp lingo) drivers which are a pain to find though the vista ones may help..
I still hv to get that fn workin on my friends vaio upgrading to win 7..
I used many random quick launch setups to get it right on my hp for xp.