Anilrgowda

Question: Someone asked me to replace Vista on a Gateway notebook with XP Home. Thought it would be easy but boy, did I find out different. When the XP CD is placed in the NB it soon states that the hard drive cannot be found.

I did the following:
* used DBAN to wipe the hard drive
* downloaded from Gateway the SATA driver for 32-bit OS and put it on floppy disk
* put floppy in external USB floppy drive and plugged it into NB
* booted from XP CD and pressed F6 to get to install third party drivers and when the time came loaded the driver from the floppy
* same error message cannot find hard drive
* went into BIOS and toggled Large Disk Access Mode from DOS to Other, same error message
* there is no other area in BIOS that mentions the hard drive so cannot enable/disable SATA or otherwise

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Anilrgowda

Be that as it may, it's only the only site I've found that has the information and the drivers you'll likely need. If you know someone who reads Spanish, the original site is here:

Drivers Windows Xp Gateway Mt6707 - Foros Overclockers.cl v5

I neither speak nor read Spanish, but will give you my best understanding of the translated page.

Tthe link below the word Unloading: is to the download for the drivers you'll need. It is a 70Mb file located on RapidShare. Those are here:

RapidShare: 1-Click Webhosting

Since I don't need them, I didn't download them to see if they were in English or Spanish. As to the rest of the instruction, here's what I make of it:

1. Download nlite from nLite - Deployment Tool for the bootable Unattended Windows installation - Download Integrate the SATA controller drivers with the Windows xp sp2. (stuff in parentheses, I'm adding . . . instructions for using nlite can be found at nLite - Deployment Tool for the bootable Unattended Windows installation - Guide Use of the term "integrate" makes more sense once you've read them. step 1 here corresponds to the Part 1 nlite instructions)

2. (From the nlite Part 2 instructions) Search the SATA controller drivers (from Step 1) for Intel® 82801GBM SATA AHCI Controller Mobile ICH7M/DH and add that.

3. (Corresponding to the nlite Step 3 instructions) Make ISO and burn the image to CD. This new CD is what you will use to boot your notebook computer.

4. Note that when you boot with the new CD, the system recognizes the 160Gb hard drive (the number they used. not meant to say that it is the same size as the drive in your system) and that there are two partitions on it. (this is specific to a system that has not had the drive wiped)

5. Erase all the partitions on the hard drive and create new partitions of whatever size(s) the user desires.

6. Install the customized XP installation (the one you just created with nlite)

7. After the install is finished, install the rest of the drivers you downloaded one by one

8. You will need to force the Intel Gigabit driver, point the system to the driver you downloaded instead of looking for it on the Internet. Despite any warnings the driver install generates, it will work.

(Hopefully you did understand this important bits of the next part, which I am copying directly from the translated site

That would be everything, some details:
- The modem is a motorola SM56 but with driver modified
- The VGA is a GM950
- The sound is an Audio Sigmatel HD
- The wireless connected to the network wi-fi without problems

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