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Downgrading from Vista to XP

post #1 of 15
10/21/07 at 7:22pm
Thread Starter 
I have an Alienware m9700 with Vista ultimate on, shipped that way, and because of the lack of SLI drivers for vista I've been thinking of downgrading to XP. I have a full version of XP home and I tried formatting the hd and running the xp install but it says it doesn't see any hard drives... I did some looking and I reformatted it to FAT32 instead of NTFS and still no sucess(no hard drives again). I reinstalled Vista and I haven't found anything yet. Is there like a specific way to downgrade?

edit: I tried Dual booting first using this guide but i got the no hard drives so then I tried formatting the entire thing. My guess is if theres a solution it would fix both and I'd prefer to dual boot incase anyone was wondering.
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post #2 of 15
10/21/07 at 9:42pm
U cannot install XP if u have a SATA Drive, u need a USB Floppy Drive w/ the SATA Drivers for XP ,before u can install XP (If that is the type of Drive u have) without them XP will not see any Drives at all...............I'd go to Alienware and look for the SATA Drivers for ur Alienware m9700, and see if they even offer any SATA Drivers for XP.........GOOD LUCK!
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post #3 of 15
10/22/07 at 1:25am
Thread Starter 
So If i was searching on google what would I look for? sata drivers? or what
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post #4 of 15
10/22/07 at 1:29am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Alarand View Post
So If i was searching on google what would I look for? sata drivers? or what

Like I said, I'd 1st go to Alienware website and look for the SATA Drivers for ur Alienware m9700, and see if they even offer any SATA Drivers for XP
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post #5 of 15
10/22/07 at 1:37am
Thread Starter 
Sorry, I was watching tv and wasn't really paying attention so I didn't really add detail. I'm sure if I called them up they could give me the drivers, but they dont have them under the regular support page. Like I said though, would I be looking for "SATA drivers" or something else because there isn't a SATA drivers option listed.

Edit: If it's gonna help at all, "System Drive: Extreme Performance (RAID 0) - 400GB (200GB x 2) Serial ATA 1.5Gb/s 7,200 RPM w/ NCQ & 16MB Cache"
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post #6 of 15
10/22/07 at 1:45am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Alarand View Post
Sorry, I was watching tv and wasn't really paying attention so I didn't really add detail. I'm sure if I called them up they could give me the drivers, but they dont have them under the regular support page. Like I said though, would I be looking for "SATA drivers" or something else because there isn't a SATA drivers option listed.
If you know what motherboard u have in ur Alienware m9700, then u can find the SATA Drivers for XP, they might not be listed under ur model number, so the motherboard is a good place to start looking...........try looking in ur Owners manual (if you don't know what model ur motherboard is) if u have Vista up & running start looking in ur Device Manager in the Control Panel to find out what SATA Drivers u have under Vista, then look for the ones for XP, if you can find them on the Alienware m9700 website, I'm sure there u can download them?
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post #7 of 15
10/22/07 at 2:00am
Thread Starter 
Motherboard: Alienware® NVIDIA® Mobile SLi Chipset

is all it says in the receipt online, it doesn't show anything in the one I got in the manual but it says hitachi 200GB 7200RPM SATA system drive x2 for the drive. I'll look some more
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post #8 of 15
10/22/07 at 2:04pm
I wouldnt even worry about it if I were you. I put Vista on my desktop, then wanted to revert back to XP. Vista hosed my MBR so badly that even using boot CDs to re-write the entire hard drive to all 0's and formatting the MBR multiple times didnt work. As soon as I got XP installed, it would still try to boot into a Vista install that didn't exist. I had to buy a new hard drive...
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post #9 of 15
10/22/07 at 2:21pm
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post #10 of 15
10/22/07 at 11:42pm
Thread Starter 
*Sighs* I think it would be easier to wait i guess too, no point in having to reinstall everything AGAIN when xp fails to install. Now what to do while waiting for the non-existing SLI notebook drivers to appear
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post #11 of 15
10/23/07 at 12:49am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Alarand View Post
*Sighs* I think it would be easier to wait i guess too, no point in having to reinstall everything AGAIN when xp fails to install. Now what to do while waiting for the non-existing SLI notebook drivers to appear
READ THIS THREAD:http://www.notebookforums.com/thread206505.html having to install everything or even trying to find XP Drivers and then installing them is a pain-in-the-ass and not worth all the trouble u will put yourself thur............u may not like Vista right now but (it's not a mature OS yet and it's only 10 months old) However, at the end of the day at least u have a working PC that's up and running.........Vista SP 1 will be out in about 3 or 4 more months, it's already in BETA, so I'd just wait this one out, if I were u? it will save u a lotta headaches, trying to downgrade to XP when ur PC was made for the Vista OS by ur OEM...........I was lucky, both my notebooks came w/ XP MCE 2005 well over a yr ago, and both have been upgraded to Vista, if I really wanted to, I could downgrade back to XP on both, without any problems at all, but in your case, that may NOT be so easy
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post #12 of 15
10/24/07 at 8:54pm
Hey man , THE DRIVERS ARE FINALLY OUT!!!! Just go the Alienware's site and get em
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post #13 of 15
10/24/07 at 10:36pm
If your laptop has an option in bios to switch/turn off ahci for hard drive then windows xp will recongnize hard drive without any additional drives.
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post #14 of 15
12/7/07 at 4:25am
i had the same problem, i have to go into setup of the computer and switch the drive from SATA and that worked for me. as it goes for drivers, that's a total pain. it took me all day to find the drivers i needed. good luck.
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post #15 of 15
1/3/08 at 4:52am
www.laptopvideo2go.com
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