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Saturday, April 12, 2008

Vista and XP on Toshiba Satellite A200 (PSAF6A)

The Aim: To dual boot Windows XP with Windows Vista on my Toshiba Satellite A200/w00 laptop. Windows Vista was installed first but i wanted to go for Windows XP for when I am on the go in hope that the batteries will last a little longer.

The Problem: New laptops come with fast SATA hard drives with RAID and or ACHI set ups and usually don't come with a floppy drive. Windows XP installer CDs can only detect IDE hard drives so in XP's point of view you have no hard drive on your laptop to install XP on.

The Solution: Download SATA hard drive drivers and use F6 during XP installation to load the drivers from a floppy drive to make XP detect SATA hard drives. Problem is that most of use who have the latest SATA HDDs don't have a floppy drive and why would you want to carry it around???

Simple Solution: Download drivers from Toshiba's web site (Notebooks > Support > Drivers and BIOS> Select Model > Select HDD Driver from list / at least it is for Toshiba AU) NOW here is the TRICKY part, for some reason they can't call it SATA drivers but ACHI or RAID depending on what set up your laptop is in.

  • After you download the drivers you can get a floppy disk and put all the files on a floppy.
  • Turn on your laptop with Vista running and open Intel Storage Matrix Manager and then determine what controller for SATA you use.
  • Reset the computer and start the Windows XP installation process
  • Press F6
  • Plug in a USB Floppy drive (before the Windows XP set up starts)
  • Place floppy in floppy drive
  • Select model/driver of HDD your using
  • Continue on as normal
This option requires you to get a floppy drive from somewhere and hence i didn't use. It was going to be my back up option, maybe borrow one form a friend or school.

5 comments:

  1. thanks alottttttttttttttttttttt

    ReplyDelete
  2. did all that and it appeared to work. Then somewhere during the process my laptop crashed and the installation process was not completed.

    Retried the exact same thing, but now when loading the same drivers from the floppy, it still doesn't find the hard disks...

    So the drivers that I downloaded and worked the first time round do not seem to do anything this time round.

    Laptop not usable at present until I can install XP onto it. Any suggestions? Can I set an IDE emulate mode in bios?

    My laptop is A200 PSAF6A-0W001N

    ReplyDelete
  3. No sorry, I just post my methods on fixing the problems as a reference if anyone wanted to know I am not a qualified technician or anything and do not take any responsibility in what you do with the knowledge gained from reading my post. Please keep that in mind when doing anything risky.

    Best of luck, I hope you get it solved. =) and post here if you! thanks

    ReplyDelete
  4. and just for some extra info to hopefully help with my post from earlier: the F6 driver floppy creation disk came from
    http://www.mytoshiba.com.au/support/notebooks/satellite/a200/psaf6a-0w001n/download?os=22

    this gave me a disk with 4 drivers to select - originally when the process did work, it automatically highlighted the 2nd driver in list which I used.

    Since the crash none of them work.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I have had some success.

    After reading the readme file which comes with the drivers, it seemed to imply that the HDD you are trying to install XP on must have one of the supported OS on it. After the crash I presume there was nothing on the HDD that the XP setup process could recognise, hence (maybe) the drivers didn't work.

    I then took the HDD out and stuck it in a SATA USB adaptor. Doing this allowed me to setup XP on the USB drive which XP did find (stupidly it cannot find it when stuck in the laptop tho!). When placing this HDD back in the laptop, and trying to continue to installation from the point when the first restart is required is then the end of the process - you will get a message saying there is a problem with your hardware configuration and windows cannot start.

    No panic, I thought as at least now there is some form of XP to a certain degree on the HDD.

    I now restarted the XP installation progress from scratch using the F6 floppy drive option. When selecting the original driver, it failed again; but usiong the 3rd driver in the list it now worked!!!

    I have no logical explanation why, but mayber to do with something being on the HDD that the driver was then happy with.

    So XP is on there now.

    Unfortunately for me, the problem that I hope installing XP would fix has not happened. My laptop still automatically reboots after a while when it is on charge and I do not think it is overheating or anything like that. I thought it may be a boot sector virus, but this can now no longer be the case... I think it must be to do with the powerpack causing some sort of a short circuit or something...

    Boo!

    Ideas welcome!

    ReplyDelete