[jacobt]

Greetings all. I have recently purchased a Toshiba Satellite A205-s7464 system which came with Windows Vista Home Premium. I am really not that thrilled with Vista as a lot of my software does not run on it, and it seems like the extraneous visual fluff eats up a lot of memory on this machine. I would like to install my old copy of Windows XP Professional, but so far have been unsuccessful. I am not adverse to formatting the works and doing a clean install of XP, but I am right now only trying to install the two OS's parallel, since it seems this should be easier and wiser.
I have partitioned my HD and I have downloaded all the drivers for my notebook from Toshiba and from Intel and slipstreamed them into an XP install disk, as well as the generic Toshiba sATA drivers, but when I load the Windows XP setup I continue to get the "Hard Drive Not Found" error message. I am pretty sure that this has to do with the recovery partition Toshiba puts at the start of the drive. I really don't want to totally wipe this and void my warranty or anything like that. I am wondering how I can get this install to work and am getting very frustrated, any advice would be helpful. Thanks, Jacob.

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When dual booting Vista with XP you have to make sure that you install the earlier version of windows first, in this case XP. Ideally what you want to do is the following;

-Create two partitions (one for XP one for Vista)
-Install XP on first partition
-Install Vista on second partition (Home premium requires 40gb of which 15gb is allocated to installing the OS)

...Taking into account installing all the correct drivers and software needed on each OS.

[mazuk]

When dual booting Vista with XP you have to make sure that you install the earlier version of windows first, in this case XP. Ideally what you want to do is the following;

-Create two partitions (one for XP one for Vista)
-Install XP on first partition
-Install Vista on second partition (Home premium requires 40gb of which 15gb is allocated to installing the OS)

...Taking into account installing all the correct drivers and software needed on each OS.

[jacobt]

When dual booting Vista with XP you have to make sure that you install the earlier version of windows first, in this case XP. Ideally what you want to do is the following;

-Create two partitions (one for XP one for Vista)
-Install XP on first partition
-Install Vista on second partition (Home premium requires 40gb of which 15gb is allocated to installing the OS)

...Taking into account installing all the correct drivers and software needed on each OS.

I
Thanks but that doesn't really answer my question. I have two partitions created. The one that Vista is already on. And the one that I would like to install XP to. There is another one on the laptop as well, I presume- a hidden partition that the recovery tools are installed to. This partition is why Windows XP installer will not recognize the drive, I presume. Any ideas on how to get the XP installer to recognize the drive? Thanks.