So I was too smart.........

I bought a Phillips x66 notebook (UK - which now I know means single-supplier PC-World and spin-off Tec-Guys OEM & support) with pre-installed vista ultimate with AMI BIOS and decided I wanted XP on it as well to retain compatibility with my home PC. I looked on internet and found a "how to" (yes I know...now!) that said - simple. Shrink partition using gparted, install xp, then use vista recovery to fix everything! EASY....... not.

I had gathered all the xp drivers for the x66 - sata etc and created a nLite iso to do install.........

Well .... I had guessed that vista would not like the repartition and sure enough after shrinkage when I rebooted it fell into TecGuy recovery mode. I ignored this as I knew XP install would scribble all over the disk MBR and so I'd have to run Vista recovery anyway.........

...so I went ahead with XP install, which went well until it did a reboot.....

the pc hung at the PHILIPS BIOS startup splash screen.

I couldn't get to BIOS Setup. Pressing DEL just got a POST-type display that stopped after it 'detected hard drive'... It displayed it was 'entering SETUP' but it didn't get to the blue screens.... It also wouldn't boot from CD/DVD, which rather scuppered things. No HDD boot, no DVD/CD boot.. ergo no boot.

I removed the hard drive and, lo, the system booted from CD. I replaced the hard drive and it wouldn't.

I took the HD to someone with a spare SATA chassis and they found a disk partition error.... Deleted the partition I'd created so no partition errors.

Put HD back in laptop and started - same problem........ what the f&*K!

Clearly the BIOS is sensing HDD VISTA configs and forcing an OEM reboot if it finds a HDD with messed up data, and prevents a CD boot .... which of course won;t work if disk is scrubbed... AGHHHH!

Any ideas! or is this OEM Re-seller lock-in??????

Man that doesn't sound like fun. To my knowledge OEM's havent been creating bios level lockdowns of the hardware with vista

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070130-8730.html this articles seems to imply the OEM Vista isn't much different then retail other then support/x64 and x32 bundling and the ability to activate windows on various pieces of hardware.

One thing you mentioned is that you use gparted to partition your disk. Vista comes with built in support to shrink/grow partitions. So you should be able to accomplish the same thing and not use a different tool.

To me it sounds like your HDD just needs to be nuked from orbit and redone. Sounds like low level format time. Although it does seem weird that a few funk partitions would lock up the whole system.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/sh...d.php?p=2705017
this article implies that this is infact possible. I'm a fan of Vista and MS products but this is kinda disturbing if it's true.