Hi guy's, I don't know if this is a hardware issue or software but hopefully some of you guy's might have a soulution for my problem. Basically I just bought my kid a second hand laptop and it has Vista installed on it. The Laptop is a Compaq Presario C700. I bought the Laptop with the intent of installing Xp on it. So when we got home I googled some on downgrading from Vista to Xp and to be honest I didn't realized that there might be so many issues. Anyway, I decided to do it as my son wants Xp, so I set the Laptop to boot from cd drive and I popped in the Xp cd. It asked to to press any key to boot from cd, but when I do, the screen goes black and I can hear the cd spinning but nothing happens, it won't boot. From searching via google I disabled SATA in the bios but still it won't boot. In your opinion, should I just leave it with Vista on it because of incompatability issues OR should I use a program like "DBAN" to format the drive first and then try install it. I've done lots of Xp installs in the past but this is the first time I've tried to downgrade to Xp from Vista. Any thoughts guy's ? Thanks
which one from this link is yours. http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/...dest_page=prodinfoCategory&lc=en&cc=ca&dlc=en so far i've upgraded 3 laptops & 1 tower from vista to xp & will soon be doing another laptop which is a twin of 1 of the previous 3 laptops.
Hi ddp, and thanks for the reply. Also apologies for the delay in replying but I've been ill since last week and am only getting around to doin this today. From the link you provided it's the 6th one down. I've just used "dban" to totally wipe the hd and when I enter the Xp disc I'm still getting nothing. Now it's not even asking me to "press any key to boot from cd". When I boot with the cd in the drive the screen just goes black and I can hear the disc spinning but it just stays that way. I've tested the Xp cd I'm using in a virtual machine so it's fine. I reckon I'm going to abandon going the xp route at this stage. I have a Vista Business disc here so I'm just gonna go with that. But in you opinion ddp, what would you say was the cause of the Laptop not accepting the Xp os ? Thanks
xp drivers link. http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareList?os=228&lc=en&cc=ca&lang=en&product=3559340&dlc=en what is the boot sequence of the drives. might have to install sata driver when windows says press f6 to install 3rd party drivers which the sata is.
Hi ddp, yes I actually had the drivers already downloaded onto a portable usb storage and was ready to go. But it won't even give me the option to to hit F6 to install any extra drivers. As soon as I boot with the xp cd the screen goes black and the disc just spins and makes a weird noise. It won't let windows load any files what so ever and gives me no option to do anything. Then if I try a Vista disc in the drive and boot, right away it says "windows is loading files". In the order of boot sequence I have (1)cd-rom (2) HD When I started out with this in mind, I was expecting a few teething probs with certain hardware but I thought I might of atleast get Xp loaded onto it *scratches head*
