Hello I have bought sony vaio VGN-FW31E, 4GB RAM, 400GB HD with vista home premium preloaded. so now I want to install visual studio 2003 in it but it doesn't support we development so I want to remove vista and install xp pro. I have tried to install xp pro but it's showing error, when I insert xp cd in to laptopit's start loading files and after loading files it shows error as bellow so i dont know what to do now i realy want to get rid of vista and want to install xp pro as soon as possible waiitng for your kind rep. thanks
hi BigBapu, I am not 100% sure, but I don't think you can downgrade that laptop to XP. It seems like all the new Sony laptops hardware no longer support XP. The best way to find out is to go to Sony's website. go to the support section, and select the download drivers page. then search for drivers for your laptop by typing in your model number. if you can only find vista drivers, then there's your answer...no XP. My brother bought a Sony laptop over a year ago and he ran into this same problem. He bought it with the intention of downgrading to XP but was unable to do so. I'm sure that physically the hardware can work with XP, but it appears that Sony has no interest in creating drivers for XP since all their computers now ship with vista.
You may be able to find the drivers elsewhere; most components are not made by sony, and you can find XP64 drivers on the maker's site. I remember XP86 had a glitch where it would not install on a system with over 3GB ram, you might try installing with one stick of ram removed.
BigBapu, are you using a regular xp cd from ms or a a recovery disk from another manufacturer? how do you have the hard drive setup in the bios, sata or ide? try ide. did you delete all the partitions on the hard drive, make a new partition then format it part way thru installing xp? sony uk site only shows vista drivers but is most likely can be upgraded to xp but will take some work to do that.
hello first of all thenks for your rep. in device manager if i expand IDE ATA/ATAPI CONTROL NODE it shows "Intel(R) ICH9M-E/M SATA AHCI Control". and yes I have xp pro sp1 cd with product key and second thing when ever i start installation xp i am not getting up to that stage to format partion i mean it loads all the files in starting and after that it shows error so i dont know what to do now and yesterday i was reading one article about nLite but i don't know how does it works so i will see today. and when i contact sony they says this model is not compatible to downgrade to xp waiting for your kind hep thanks abgain
try washing the disk in warm soapy water & dry with a soft cloth to get rid of any finger prints. any scratches on the cd? do yo have a friend who has xp with sp2 or sp3 just to see if does same thing or not?
i tried last night to install xp and i got the same error message. i have an acer and i know you can get the same model as i have with xp pre loaded. i even explored the disc in windows and run setup. when i presssed install xp, it said that you cant downgrade vista. from what i understand, you have to format your harddrive, change bios to boot cd, and restart with xp in the drive. this is what ive been told
i tried to do it before i logged on to afterdawn. my bad. when i get off work, im a give it another wack. thanx for the info.
my 640 gb harddrive is partitioned into 2 drives, ones recovery and the other is for system files. do i format the drive or just the one partiton. i dont want the recovery, factory applications, and anything to do with vista 64bit on my computer. my other problem is that my hd is a sata drive. do i still switch it to ide. do i do it in bios where i change the boot settings. thanx
delete the partitions then make how ever many partitions you want then have to format them. change the sata to ide in the bios so don't need sata driver for the drive.
