How can I get my HD back?

[swee'pea99]

Major problems with my eldest's laptop - so major that I ended up nuking it with DBan. Which worked fine. Except that when I try to reinstall Windows, it gets to a certain point then says:

I've done a bit of googling around, and got as far as discovering that I need to load the SATA drivers during the installation process. I downloaded them, and put them on a USB stick, but when I get to that part (you have to Press S to install from a different location) I just get a message that says 'No floppy drive was found on your computer'. It won't get the driver from the USB, and of course it's right - there *is* no floppy. Anyone have any suggestions? Thanks.

 

[ian turner]

Correct, XP insists on using floppy drives
You need to use nLite to create a new installation cd using the original and the sata drivers so that when it does the installation it has the drivers ready.

 

[Bman]

Exactly what Ian says.

And here is a step-by-Step guide:

http://www.waynezim.com/2009/07/how-to-slipstream-drivers-into-a-windows-installation-using-nlite/

 

[rusky]

Can you not just change the bios from ahci to ide?

 

[ian turner]

Can you not just change the bios from ahci to ide?

Ahem that wouldn't change the chipset just the operating mode so you'd still need the chipset drivers.

 

[rusky]

In 25 years of building PCs the only time you need 3rd party drivers is for raid or ahci, never for ide

 

[ian turner]

You'd struggle to find the ahci/ide option on my desktop pc and various other motherboards which came out with sata chipsets early on as the sata hardware is part of the raid chipset. First time I installed XP onto a new Sata drive I installed it onto the original IDE with the sata drive attached, installed all the relevant drivers then ran drive migration wizard provided by the manufacturer Last time I did a complete reinstall I used nLite to build a cd with all the various drivers included.

 

[swee'pea99]

It worked! Amazing. Thanks. XP successfully installed. (Which was done, in passing, because the original recovery disks I made as per the instructions when I got this Vaio wouldn't run - "The procedure entry point ChangeWindowMessageFilter could not be located in the dynamic link library USER32.dll") Now for the tricky bit...

I can't get the thing to go online, in fact I can't get it to do much, because I don't have the correct drivers for all the devices. (I used installation disks from another PC to install XP.) I've tried downloading the drivers, but of course this machine came out with Vista pre-intalled, so all the drivers say they're for Vista. Can I use things like the chipset.exe even tho' when I start it is says it's for Vista? Or can I/must I get XP drivers for things like the chipset (assuming I can find out what it is)?

 

[swee'pea99]

Found a page to download XP drivers. It has queries like:​

​

"Please double check the H/W SPEC if the unit is built-in Intel Graphics Device please install this driver if the unit is buit-in ATI Graphics Device please skip this step."​

​

Is there any way I can get answers to things like this? Presumably the hardware currently listed under device manager would be the hardware in the PC whose XP install disk I used? Is there any way to find out what hardware I do actually have in this machine?​

 

[rusky]

In device manager look under the details tab, the hardware id shows the PCI/ven. 8086 is Intel 1002 is ATI

You can look them up on pcidatabase.com

 

[MrJamie]

You'll have to find what the devices are and individually look for XP drivers for each. It might be easier to get the net connected over ethernet than wireless, with basic drivers im unsure.

Out of interest why did you switch to XP, i know Vista was poorly received but i thought the later service packs were pretty decent, there would be less problems with drivers and security patches in future id guess.

 

[ian turner]

Read the earlier post where they say the recovery disks they made wouldn't run so they are using old disks from another computer.
As suggested by Rusky examine the unidentified devices in Device manager and if you're lucky the network devices will be listed as unknown network devices and by looking under properties for the ven and dev values and feed them into http://www.pcidatabase.com/ to identify the manufacturers and device and download the drivers from the manufacturers download section..
Then once you've got it online you can choose the search online option when updating drivers for unknown devices in device manager.

 

[swee'pea99]

Ok, apologies for being a numpty but that link I gave above in #9 is wrong. This isn't a VGN-CR32S, it's a VGN-NR32S, and when I go to the downloads for that model, they're much less encouraging. Just four offered. (Plus I don't even know whether this is 32-bit or 64-bit. And PCIdatabase just says: "No matches found for: "VGN-NR32S"", which isn't terribly helpful.)

As to why XP not Vista, I don't have any installation disks for Vista - the only ones I had were the recovery disks, and they won't work. And I always preferred XP to Vista anyway, so I thought why not.

I just tried getting details for the unidentified network controller (big yellow ? in device manager) and among other things I saw 8086. Does that mean I should now go to Intel and get a generic XP driver for 8086?

 

[ian turner]

As I said get the network up and running and then see what it can find itself on the internet for each unknown device.
You don't have xp 64 as 64 bit os didn't really gain popularity until windows 7 and more systems capable of taking more than 4gb of ram and VGN-NR32S has a max of 4gb.

 

[swee'pea99]

Thanks, that's helpful. I haven't managed to get the network running yet, but I have managed to get online, using a USB dongle. Needless to say, it makes out it's looking for drivers on the net, but always comes back either saying it can't find any, or the one I have already is just great. Ah well, I have to go out now. Many thanks for all your help. I'll doubtless by back floundering in the mire on the morrer. Have a good evening everyone.