Hi all
If this has already been dealt with then Im sorry for re-posting and would appreciate a re-direct.
My laptop is a HP dv6000 with Vista Premium and the hard drive is a Western Digital WD2500BEVS 250gig SATA laptop hard drive.
I have set up another primary partition and would like to run WinXp Pro on it.
I was directed to the Western Digital download page and was told that the drivers were in Data Lifeguard Tools 11.2 for DOS (CD). They recommend using the Dos drivers but when I run NLite and try and add the single driver it asks for an *.inf file and there isnt one in the "Dos" folder. There is an "autorun.inf" file in the main folder that I tried to load and it started loading some of the setup files in the main directory so I created an *.ISO and tried installing XP Pro, pressed "f6" to instal 3rd party raid drivers but it still wouldnt recognize the hard drive.
Im really new at this and your help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Ron L

Sounds like you possibly have AHCI mode for SATA drives in bios enabled.
Possibly keys to launch bios when starting your pc is F2 key, DEL key, it should say what key to enter bios when you boot computer.
I dont understand how you managed to insert autorun.inf with nlite, lol, but dataguard lifetools is more of a program that enables you to modify partitons on your system as i can understand it.
If you boot xp cd and it cannot find your harddrive, i would guess ahci is enabled. I personally dont see any really good reason to having it enabled, as IDE native mode for SATA will work just fine in most cases, tho i dont have your puter to check what options are there. Anyway, you should look up your dv6000 for drivers, not your harddrive manufacturer, they cant provide you with drivers for your mainboard, as they didnt make it.

I got a bit confused, along the way here, but well see how this goes.

thank you very much for that info. I'll try and check on the bios and see if "ahci" is enabled.
"F10" got me into the PhoenixBIOS Setup Utility and I couldnt find any reference to SATA or AHCI.

Could This be what Im looking for? Hope the link works!!

Frim your link:
1. Download the SoftPaq .EXE file to a directory
on your hard drive.

2. Execute the downloaded file and follow the
on-screen instructions.

NOTE: The files needed at the F6 stage of the operating system installation can be located at:
c:\swsetup\SP38088\files

So it pretty much looks like it is what you're after.

No problem.

I have previously integrated such drivers for the gf of my mams and worked well. Im thinking of a similar HP pc.

Simply start the exe file, it should unpack some files to c:\ or you could customize where you would extract them.
ANYWAY: Simply, after extract, start nlite, goto Drivers page (after u copied XP cd to hddrive etc etc), and when choosing
the drivers, you WILL have a question of this is textmode drivers or not. that should be a YES.
*Im downloading your drivers now to check installer, it says : NOTE: The files needed at the F6 stage of the operating system installation can be located at: c:\swsetup\SP38088\files :
SO Point NLITE to that directory on drivers page.
answear yes to textmode if so. That text in installer.exe note pretty much confirmed it for me.

Im not familiar with recent PhoenixBios. One thing that does come to mind, on a previous computer some years back, i had some many harddrives, about 10-12, and all were connected to system pata/sata connectors, it could not list all devices.
However that not being the case here, Im interested in what you DID find. Anyway if u have PhoenixBios VERSION, i can look it up in a database and check what are the actual settings. I could start throwing out guesses, but time..

I think however that you might be running with raid controller enabled, but you havent actually enabled any RAID modes, that is you havent configured harddrives for raid configuration. And thus you wont see any such options either, as things not are, how do you say, language barrier, .. anyway, Check bios if you have any RAID options controller possibly activated.
If you wont use raid on harddrives, (note multiple HDDrives), you do not need it enabled. period.

It can be a pain to setup drives correctly, i know. But lets hope things work out!

Great
Since my laptop is 32 bit I had to point nLite to that folder and it had two *.inf files in it.



I choose "iastor.inf" and it came up with a whole list of drivers to choose from:



I also tried "iaahci.inf" and it came up with the same drivers.
So, should I be getting in touch with HP and ask them which drivers I should use or is there another way?
Or, should I choose all of the "mobile" drivers?
Also, on another note: During initial installation of XP Pro I can press "f5" and choose from a range of "Standard PC" to "2 Processors". Since my laptop
is a dual core which should I choose? I have been choosing "Standard PC" when I load it onto my single processor desktop. Im using XP Pro for multi track (music) recording and apparently this was better optimized for it.

UPDATE
I installed the "Intel® Matrix Storage Console" onto my Vista partition and it says that I have a "Intel®ICH8M SATA AHCI Controller"
Now when I look at the available drivers in nLite should I choose (ICH8M-E/M) or (ICH8M-E) or both. The (ICH8M-E/M) is SATA AHCI and (ICH8M-E) is
SATA RAID. (In my Vista "Start UP Manager" (msconfig) it shows that I have "RAID event monitor" from "Intel" running) Im so confused
Thank you very much for taking the time to help me out.
Ron L

GREAT we are getting somewhere =)))

About dual core machines: I set Nlite to default instead of forcing it to ACPI multi processor system, but i might as well force it, tho sometimes i check the windows Iso inside Vmware Workstation and then just use single core cpu, and if system u boot xp cd from doesnt have multicore, and u have forced it, it wont start. period. On my system i can only chose from single or multi cpu system.

Finding out what controller you have, i would check back on your manufacturer's website, look up name of machine, and find out what it contains.
Also if you are feeling still not secure about that, check for website reviews, f.ex dv6000 was it not? and add a review + benchmark f.ex to find it out.
It can take a while to find a proper review, there are so many reviews nowadays id say 90%+ is utter crap, simply because they are not thorough and doesnt tell me jack s*** more then what the maker of the product says on its website, some not even that.

You could try to download Everest Ultimate and see if that can help you with name of the controller.
Also tool such as DriverMax possibly could assist in that task. Or for that matter, see if there is a sticker somewhere on it, containing information on its hardware. Im sorry this is not better help, but that list was kind a long. Having said that again, once you have found out what controller u actually have, it might be prudent to google that exact controller and instead of going to your machine manufacturers website, try to look up intels website for that specific controllers driver.

I mean, i have a gigabyte mainboard on a pc here, and gigabyte provides all drivers to make it operate, but they dont stay as current with drivers as their original manfacturer of the invidiual components. Realtek is providing new drivers several times a month, and gigabyte is not following up on that, as much as they might do.

Anyway, Happy to help. Also, it doesnt matter what inf file you choose, its what folders you choose. Nlite will more or less take all files from it, but you have to decide what windows should use. Im walking a bit in water on this, but more or less thats the case.

Well I did manage to load WinXP Pro. I used the SATA AHCI driver and everything went just great
Now the problem started when I tried to run a dual boot screen at the startup. Win XP would boot up but Vista wouldn't.
Vista was on partition 1 and XP Pro was on partiton 2 so when I created the Vista boot file in XP I just changed the partition number from 1 to 2 which is what I did on my desktop computer and had no problems running 2 copies of XP.
So, I used my restore disk and restored Vista and got it up and running but now I cant create a new boot file in Vista because it doesnt recognize XP Pro which is still installed.
I'll probably have to take this problem to another forum.
Anyway, you have been a great help because I did get XP up and running.Thanks

You cannot have an older version of Windows (here XP) automatically configure a dual boot for a newer version (your Vista). For that you have to install XP before Vista. If you install XP after Vista, you have to tweak the dual boot manually.

Actually this is very very easy to solve. Indeed its so easy to solve its called EasyBCD =)

It lets you configure multi booting like nothing else, ive tried it and it works awesome. It also solves a whole range of annoyances with having linux, vista, windows all kinds of different operating systems on same system.

I strongly recommend you check it out.link here.