I now have a legitimate reason to hate Vista.

[Stavros]

Well, my dad's girlfriend just bought a new laptop (that I'm sending this from). She's working on her Masters degree and the college requires her to use a program called Blackboard (which I think the majority of colleges in the US require the students to use to some degree).

The problem stems from this: Vista cannot properly run Blackboard and she requested me to install my (legitimate) XP Home. I popped in the CD and let it boot up. I get to the "Install XP to a new partition" and press the appropriate button. Then the screen comes up and says "There is no hard drive installed" which I know is complete bullshit.

I just did a google for "downgrade to XP" and all the answers were pretty much the same "reinstall XP from CD".

Now if anyone has any information on how to get rid of Vista I would greatly appreciate it.

[toast]

Get to BIOS and disable "SATA native mode" to install XP.


To do a clean install of XP, it might tell you that the drivers were not found. So you need to download the Windows XP SATA/Mass Storage Controller.
You will need a floppy drive for this too.


I think.......


^_^ Toast

[isapiens]

whatever you do just back up the important stuff beforehand.

I never had a perfect windows installation/reinstallation, something always goes wrong. god damn buttpirates.

[bad_brain]

I heard of "newer version installed" errors when trying to install XP on a Vista box, if that happens use the Ultimate Boot CD from the downloads to wipe the HDD.

and yes, don't forget the backups...