I’ve had a clients laptop for about a week now.  I have to wonder – how is it that these companies, in this case Hewlett Packard, retain clients when they do stuff like this.

My client was tired of Vista.  He asked me to take the laptop and downgrade it to XP.  So I took it, popped in an XP Pro SP3 disk, and found out to my dismay that the SATA controller in use by the laptop (an HP DV2500-series, or the 2660se to be exact) is not naturally recognized by the XP installer.

The simplest solution is to get into the BIOS and make sure AHCI is disabled.  That forces the SATA controller to “pretend” to be an IDE controller, which XP happens to know how to talk to right out of the box.  HP has disabled the ability to change this setting.  You don’t even see it in the BIOS, but I know from experience that it’s there.  They want you instead to order their rescue disks.

The other solution is better, but not quite as simple.  Find out which controller is in use, download the manufacturer AHCI/SATA drivers, pop them onto a floppy, re-do the setup, and make sure you hit F6 when it tells you to, in order to load in RAID or SCSI drivers.  It searches the floppy for drivers, you select the right one, and away it goes.

So I went out and got a USB floppy drive.  Somehow I’ve managed to get by without one up to now.  And then I started digging around on HP’s website (among others), to figure out which controller this laptop is using.  To my dismay, nothing on the HP website indicates this clearly.  Absolutely nothing.

I scoured google.  I half took the laptop apart, hoping to get a glimpse of the motherboard.  I even downloaded and installed the ultimate boot cd.  UBCD allows you to also add in a bunch of plugins.  I loaded it up with tons of utilities in the hopes that one of them would tell me which controller it was using.  Alas, no luck there.  It did however see the hard-drive, which meant that its driver was working!

I copied its driver onto a floppy hoping that would be enough.  Nope, when I ran the XP install, it gave me a message about requiring a TXTSETUP.OEM file.  I searched through Microsoft documentation – clearly not worth the hassle of writing out this file.

Now I was getting desperate.  I even tried a product that was supposed to be able to make tons of modifications to your BIOS from within an OS – so I stuck the installer onto a USB stick, booted the ultimate boot cd (ubcd4win), and tried it out.  No luck.

I called HP.  They were completely useless, and pushed me to order the XP rescue disks.  Uhhh, no thanks.  I already had an XP disk, and I wasn’t going to pay them for their crippled version which comes bundled with what I consider crapware.

I finally came up with the idea of downloading and installing Linux, as I was fairly certain that was a bulletproof way of finding out which controller is in use.  I’ve tried many distros but in times like these, I like to pick ones I’ve never tried before, just for the heck of it.  I headed over to distrowatch.com and downloaded CentOS.

I deployed it to a USB stick (quick tutorial coming soon) and booted the laptop with it.  5 minutes later I had the name of my controller – it’s an Intel ICH8M/ICH8M-E.  I found the drivers on the intel site, put them on a floppy, and ran the XP install.   Still no joy.

So I fired up nLite and created a new XP image, with the driver slip-streamed in.  Voila.

I’m exhausted.  But at least now XP is installing.  I wonder why the same drivers on a floppy didn’t work.
I’m going to see if creating a USB stick to install a slipstreamed XP is a viable solution.  If it works, I’ll write a quick tutorial on it.

Okay, rant over!

Originally posted 2009-08-16 11:07:32.