Problem Loading Windows XP SP2 on Sager NP9860

Hello Laptop Community

I recently purchased a Sager NP9860 (Delivered Wednesday). It has an ATA 60gig drive in it, and it is the only drive. I do have the floppy drive (thankfully).

Since being delivered I have been trying to load a Corporate Version of Windows XP that I get through work. (SP2 is preloaded to disk).

The main problem I am having is the SATA hard drive and Windows not being able to see the driver. BIOS has Hyperthreading on and ATA set for the Hard Drive.

After a lot of troubleshooting on my own I am stuck and need some help. I have read this forum pretty extensivily and I from time to time see people having my problem, but I never see a resolution.

I will lead you through the process that I am currently trying to load my system. Possibly someone there can figure out what I need to do, to make this work.

I took the drivers from your website for the ATA Hard Drive. I loaded them to a Floppy, left the WinXP folder and its contents, but I also copied the conents of the WinXP folder to the root directory of the Floppy Drive.

I then put my WinXP cd in, its starts up and I hit F6 to load the Hard Drive drivers. Goes through loading the Windows Files, then goes to the floppy. I point it to the WinXP ATA driver. It loads.
I pick the hard drive, load Windows.
When it gets to loading the Hard Drive sys file, it says it cannot find the file. I end up having to skip it because it does not know to look at the floppy. (Even though moments ago I pointed at it and it allowed me to see the Hard Drive to load to).

Once it gets done loading Windows, I put in a DOS disk and boot to a Windows 95 version of DOS and then copy the ULSATA.sys, ULSata.inf, ptipbm.dll, and ulsata.cat files to the the following Windows directories.
\Windows\System32 Windows\System32\Drivers and then copy UlSata.inf to \Windows\INF

I then can go into the Windows Installation and it does the 39 minute count down and does it's thing. When it gets done, it reboots and I get a blue screen screen just after you see the "Windows Xp" screen. It actually dies right when you see the moving graphic begin to move.

The blue screen gives a STOP error. Basically it tells me to do chkdsk and check for a boot sector virus.

So I jump back to DOS run scan disk (full), and then chkdsk /f. Both are fine.

Well after trying to reinstall, probably 20 different times now (with different disks, but all SP2). I finally started to think about it some more. So I jumped on the Pheonix Motherboard website and got the DOS BIOS installer. I then took the BIOS driver 1.0.0.33 from the sagernotebook.com website. I loaded the BIOS. Then did all of the above steps to reload. Still getting the same BSOD.

I really am stumped at this point and would appreciate any help. Throwing the laptop out the Windows is not an option btw


Thank You for your time,
Brandon

Thanks Computer_Potato,

I actually did have my floppy set up like that That was one of the suggestions I had read on the forum.

I think the problem is the XP (SP2) disk my company handed out doesn't have those driver files and doesn't know to look at the floppy for them (odd).

Here is the weird update.

I managed to find the original Pro OEM disk the company got from Microsoft. No Sp 1, No SP2, I figured what the heck lets give it a try.

I'm in the middle of trying that, so far no issues with seeing the Hard Drive. But I have not gotten a load completed. And once the load was finished and it was rebooting to the OS for the first time was when I had problems with SP2.

I think next I'll try 2000 server, found a CD for that (just not sure if the key is built in or not, because I couldn't find that). Just kind of wanted WinXP on my system for screen shot purposes, I do most of the documenting for our companies knowledge base, and we have the older style screen shots taken care of.

Anyways....I'll be back with what happens.

I'll post if this works, just in case someone else has a similar problem in the future.

Yeah, unless it stops working for some reason.

Hello again,

I ended up going down to the original OEM disk that my company got from Microsoft, not the version that was put together by our companies programmers and it did work fine. I tried multiple versions, SP1 disks, SP2 disks, all from different months, we make new ones often.

I never did try taking the disk out "ThoseMeddInKids," I don't know if that would have done it.

I think what happened here is the programmed disks I was using just were not setup correctly. I'll set down with the person who makes up our install disks and see what we can do this in the future.

Moral of the story, not a Sager problem, just a really weird install disk problem.