Hello. Recently I was messing around with my Vista OS and had to do a system restore. I then got a problem where I was stuck at a blank screen with only a pointer no matter how I booted it. I wanted to go to XP anyway, not that I have anything against Vista. I found this program and found it simple enough and I'm now working on that very laptop with XP. I have a large problem, though.

I am running on a Sony Vaio VGN-AR520E... not that it matters. The whole product line came preinstalled with Vista Home Premium, so they obviously do not want to mess with Windows XP. All of their drivers are in a Vista format. I scrounged around enough to get my wireless card working, the graphics card moving optimally... I am doing everything was able to on Vista, but I have a problem. My sound card does not work and I cannot find any drivers for it is Sony specific.

Here is my question:

I had to use nLite in the first place to load some SATA drivers into a copy of XP in order to get past an error with an undetectable hard drive.
I can download all of the Sony Vaio drivers, and they come in a .exe format, which I cannot run.

Would it be possible to download these drivers, and incorporate them with the SATA driver despite them being in another format? I would like to pull these .exe files into the installation disk and have these drivers installed with XP itself. I do not know if because of their Vista format I cannot or if I cannot just because they are executable files.

That is all.

Thanks

Well I know my Sony UX uses a lot of driver and applications provided by Sony, all of these are repacked by Sony to have model checks, this may be the case for your laptop.

My suggestion learn how to make a driverpack from www.driverpacks.net and then for the rest of the applications from Sony that need to be installed you can unpack them and find the appropriate switched to install them silent ( I just repacked all mine into switchless silent installers ) this way you get a unattended install, kinda like your own home made restore CD but without all the bloat these large company's pack into these rather large DVD's.

Again I would suggest learning how to find switches to make your installers silent, lots of info here at MSFN and am sure folks can help you out if you get stuck....

There seems to be little common knowledge about the fact that inside winnt.sif one can enable i think it was [textmode-something](cant remember name exactly) drivers, so you tell windows setup where to look for storage drivers that are installed
when in "text mode", the blue screen part where you copy files from cd/dvd after formatting/choosing install partition.

I can't remember exactly where i read about it, but it is possible.
That way you can bypass any need for running any silent installer or integrating drivers.

It is mentioned here http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/view/web/18/ that you can create Textmode folder, but im not sure if that was the same thing i read about, i think not.
Sorry cant remember where it was atm. In any case you can try to just create textmode folder as it says there and copy your sata drivers or such to that folder, and you're done and done.
Windows setup reads $OEM folders regardless, so you dont have to edit any other file or even in nlite, you dont have to use nlite at all, $oem folders are read anyway.

Yeah the winnt.sif way = http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/view/web/34/

I actually started off using this method... it has been a long time since them but I think I abandoned that method purely because it was not reliable + I could pack the drivers into 7z archive for a lot smaller installation going the DPs BASE way over at driverpacks.net

With my new UMPC I just used nLite to inegrate the drivers because I only had 2 drivers.

I would suggest the user try both methods because one might be unsuccessful!

PS. just forgot, what I meant about silent installers was that Sony has applications not drivers which cannot be installed via any driver mothod ie like camera software or external button software.