[Ftrax]

Hi there

Please forgive me possibly being in the wrong place!

I'm not familiar with how this all works, found a similar problem to mine, then went through all the postings but could find nothing further on it.

Completely understand if you need me to do this another way....

Partner bought an ex-lease laptop compaq presario c502tu. It was advertised as having XP home addition on it.

I've since found that this isn't the case, we've got Vista (ugh lol).

I have an Microsoft Windows XP professional (2002 incl SP2) disk and the prod key code.

I'm obivously doing something wrong!

Your forum post as follows;
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[i]Doesn't really matter what we think of Vista. He is asking how to format and install XP and whether or not it is difficult, not what our opinion of Vista is.

Obsessed. It is actually not difficult once you obtain the XP OEM cd to format and install xp upon your computer.

I will gladly walk you through the process once you obtain the cd, and I will list the drivers you will need and how to get them.

Do you have a usb flash drive? It may be handy to get them. Usually when you format the pc xp will not know what any of the hardware is on your machine thus it will not be able to connect to the internet to obtain the drivers you do need. Therefore you need either a usb flash drive and access to another pc (so that you may download the drivers, drop them on the flash drive, then plug the flash drive into the laptop and install from there) and/or a cd burner and another pc (or if the toshiba can burn cds you can download the drivers now to cd, then burn, then format etc...

Let me know when you obtain the xp cd, and we'll go from there.


Starting with reference on the specs of your laptop.
http://www.csd.toshi.....kceghdgngdgmn.
This post has been edited by AitrusSkyy: Sep 27 2008, 05:06 AM


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Can anyone help at all please? This is really doing my head in, system wont let me load from disk, nor will it allow me to format the c drive!



Kind Regards
Fi

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Boot the system from the XP CD and follow the prompts.

During the installation routine, you will be offered the choice to delete any or all existing partitions to create more unpartitioned space for your new XP partition. You can then tell it to use some or all of this unpartitioned space and the installation routine will set up the partition. The next step offered is to format the new partition and then install XP on it.

It's really pretty easy.

[SpywareDr]

Boot the system from the XP CD and follow the prompts.

During the installation routine, you will be offered the choice to delete any or all existing partitions to create more unpartitioned space for your new XP partition. You can then tell it to use some or all of this unpartitioned space and the installation routine will set up the partition. The next step offered is to format the new partition and then install XP on it.

It's really pretty easy.

[rshaffer61]

Before you go through all this did you make sure there were XP drivers for everything n your system?
Nothing worse then doing all this and finding out there is no graphics or audio driver for your system.
Also if you have no intentions on ever using Vista then there is probably a recovery partition on the hard drive also. If you completely delete all the partitions then you will have full use of the hard drive.

You can go to HERE to read the tutorial by one of the members here on how to do a Fresh Install or Repair Installation of you OS.

[Ftrax]

Hi there, thank you both for your replies ) Yes usually pretty easy but none of the usual tricks worked. However I did find the answer, had to disable SATA in the bios. As soon that was done, format and upload performed as usual.

Thanks again,

Have a great day )

Fi

[rshaffer61]

Disable or did you change it to IDE?
In the older bios the SATA was not recognized and the SATA had to be changed to emulate IDE.
Either way I'm glad to see you were able to get everything squared away. If there is anything else we can help with please let us know.
Again congratulations.