XP Downgrade - Hard Disk Driver Question - Help Needed!

[stephenmcavoy]

hello all. I'm running a Vaio FZ21S and have perservered with Vista for 2 months now with no joy..... it sucks. I'm trying to downgrade back to XP but when I format the disk and go through the XP installation process it says "setup cannot find any hard disks installed...". I realise in need the drivers for this but have no idea where too look for them. Any ideas???? One website suggests looking at the motherboard manufacturers site but I have no idea who made the mobo. The hard drive is a Fujitsu but I can't seem to find any drivers on their site. PLEAASE HELP!!!
Steve

[stephenmcavoy]

if anyone can help here it would be greatly appreciated as I'm a littly further on but stil stuck. As the laptop has no floppy I'll have to slipstream the drivers into the installation cd. I'm confident I can do this if I follow the instructions. My problem is this:
Where do I find the SATA drivers???? When I check the drivers for the drive on this OS (vista) it lists them as Disk.sys and Partmgr.sys. Do I just slipstream these two files in the XP Install CD????

Hope someone can help,

Steve

[Blencogo]

Hi Steve,

You need to download the SATA driver '1_SATA_DRIVER.ZIP from Sony Support here: -

ftp://ftp.vaio-link.com/PUB/OS/XPDOWNGRADE/FZ29/DRIVERS/

Download the .ZIP file to a temporary directory and right-click on it and choose "Extract All". Extract to somewhere you can find the driver again!

These are the XP Drivers for the FZ29-Series Vaio and will ALL work on your FZ21S except for the Viseo Driver (the FZ29 uses the Intel Integrated Graphics).

Are you using nLite to slipstream the install?

Good Luck.

[stephenmcavoy]

thanks a lot. I've been tearing my hair out over this. As far as slipstreaming the cd..... i don't really know yet as i've never done anything like that before. Is nLite the recommendation?
also: any ideas about the video driver??? nvidia perhaps?

[Blencogo]

Steve,

Yes, nLite seems the favorite on this forum - mainly because it is free and has very good guides to follow.

http://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html

There are no XP Drivers or XP Utilities for your model supplied by Sony but the FZ29 Drivers will work. You will need an XP nVidia driver from http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/drivers

Utilities have been a problem - without these things like screen brightness, Power Management and other Fn Keys will not work. It seems that the Sony Far East website has released some XP Utilities but I don't know if these work properly.

Come back if you have any problems and let us know how you get on.

Good Luck.

[stephenmcavoy]

thanks again. I'll certainly let you know how much I can get working again and I'll try and give those far east sony drivers a go.