At my July WinSIG I planned on showing how simple and easy it was to add Windows XP to my Laptop with Vista pre-installed by Sony.
Problems arose which made my presentation less than memorable:
On Monday, Aug 10, I plan to show how to overcome my problems.
First, my laptop refused to connect to MicroCenter's wireless node, so I couldn't go online to show some demo pages. It had connected flawlessly the previous month.
Second, After showing how to make room for the new operating system with a disk partition manager (Partition Magic, Acronis Disk Director, Windows Disk Management), I rebooted the laptop with a Windows XP boot CD. After XP cranked through its initial screens, I was informed that there were no hard drives present.
Third, I had neglected to turn off the SATA AHCI in the laptop BIOS
AHCI is the acronym for the Advanced Host Controller Interface. It is a new interface specification that enables advanced SATA features like Native Command Queuing (NCQ) and hot-plugging. Unless it is specifically enabled, the SATA controller will run in IDE emulation mode.
This BIOS feature controls the SATA controller's AHCI functionality.
When enabled, the SATA controller's AHCI functionality is enabled.
When disabled, the SATA controller's AHCI functionality is disabled. The SATA controller will run in IDE emulation mode.
If your system hardware supports AHCI, you should enable AHCI, even if you do not intend to use features like hot-plugging. This is because switching from the IDE emulation mode to AHCI mode is often problematic. Before enabling AHCI for operating systems that do not have native AHCI support though, you should first load the proper device driver.
On the other hand, disabling AHCI support allows for maximum compatibility with older hardware. Even with the proper AHCI driver installed, it is possible for a system to crash while installing or booting up an operating system. Disabling this BIOS in such cases will normally resolve the issue.
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Fourth, I could not search the web for assistance. At the end of the meeting, I asked a MicroCenter salesman, who told me that there was a "ton" of information on the web about that problem. When I was able to surf the web, I found drivers on the Sony site to specifically allow XP to recognize AHCI or RAID devices by pressing "F6" at the appropriate time during XP CD boot-up, then loading the drivers.
Fifth, the drivers were compressed .exe files which could only be opened on the laptop, in Vista. The uncompressed files could then be copied to a floppy or USB stick or CD.
Sixth, I did not have a floppy drive on my laptop, and wasn't sure if I could read a USB floppy or a USB thumb drive from the boot CD "f6" window.
So I resolved to check out all of the problems for solutions before my next presentation.
