Sean Henderson Dot Com

I get asked a lot, "how do you replace Vista with XP?"  I’ve done this hundreds of times since Windows Vista’s inception.  The party for Windows XP may soon be over, but before it is, I’ll quickly walk through the problems I went though early on and the steps I took to fix them.  Eventually this will not work efficiently anymore much like installing Windows 98 on a new laptop does not work efficiently due to lack of driver support.  (Note that for this post I am referring to the 32-bit version of XP that can’t handle more than 4GB of ram, or 3.x GB of ram… whatever.)

Problem: XP setup doesn’t recognize SATA drives on laptops
What I did: At first, I panicked and bought a USB floppy drive because most computers as of late do not have floppy drives.  Then at boot up of the XP CD, I could load the SATA drivers from a floppy disk.  This didn’t work out nicely for me.  Eventually I chose to slipstream the SATA drivers into my XP CD with nlite.  Once I had an XP CD with all the SATA and AHCI drivers on it, I could install XP on any Vista laptop’s hard drive.  The only hard part was locating the drivers.  I think I got them from intel’s website or driverpacks website. If you fail to do this, you may experience an unmountable boot volume blue screen of death; Fun.

 

Problem: High Definition Audio Driver does not work!
What I did: I noticed that a lot of laptops had modems integrated with the high definition audio.  No matter what I tried, I could not get the driver to install or work.  I later found this issue discussed in Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 888111.  However the fix was not available for download.  Someone sent me a Universal Audio Architecture Fix that was only valid for XP SP2 and earlier: WindowsXP-KB888111-x86-ENU.exe.  It came with the following instructions for SP3 users:
————————-
Open Regedit and go to :
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\
SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Windows

find CSDVersion key
100 (hex) means its sp1
200 (hex) means its sp2
300 (hex) means its sp3

Change it from 300 to 200 and restart
Install WindowsXP-KB888111-x86-ENU.exe (Microsoft UAA Patch)
Install drivers
Change CSDVersion back to 300.
Restart
————————-
After installing this patch, I was able to install the sound and modem.  So first find the patch, do the registry thing, and then install your drivers.

 

Problem: Where do I find XP drivers???
What I did: Most vendors pushing these Vista laptops do not offer support or drivers for XP.  That leaves the task up to you to find the drivers.  The first thing I did was go to Windows Update and hope that Microsoft would find some of the drivers for me.  In most cases, it found one or two, but not many.  Still, this is an easy start.

The second thing I did was I went to driverpacks website and I downloaded every driver pack available for XP.  They are packages compressed in 7zip format.  I used WinRAR to uncompress them into folders.  Then I burned these folders on a DVD-R:

 Volume in drive D is DriverPacks
 Volume Serial Number is XXXX-XXXX

Directory of D:\

DriverPack-BASE-v8-05
DriverPack-Chipset-v8-03
DriverPack-CPU-v8-04
DriverPack-Graphics-A-v8-04
DriverPack-Graphics-B-v8-04
DriverPack-Graphics-C-v8-04
DriverPack-LAN-v8-05-3
DriverPack-MassStorage-v8-05
DriverPack-Modem-v8-06
DriverPack-Sound-A-v8-05
DriverPack-Sound-B-v8-05
DriverPack-WLAN-v8-06
8-8-igp_xp32_dd_ccc_wdm_sb_gart_enu_67975
aiw-hd_xp32_dd_ccc_avivo_66164
DPInst
DP_Broadband_wnt5_x86-32_70416
DP_BT_wnt5_x86-32_080819
DP_Input_wnt5_x86-32_070923
DP_Misc_wnt5_x86-32_71216
DP_Monitor_wnt5_x86-32_07111
DP_Phone_wnt5_x86-32_80207
DP_PrintersCanonInkjet_wnt5_x86-32_61105
DP_PrintersCanonLaserjet_wnt5_x86-32_61020
DP_PrintersHP_wnt5_x86-32_71126
DP_Scanner_wnt5_x86-32_60831
DP_SmartCardReader_wnt5_x86-32_80228
DP_TCR_wnt5_x86-32_1
DP_TModem_wnt5_x86-32_1
DP_TouchScreen_wnt5_x86-32_708
DP_TV_wnt5_x86-32_80908
DP_USB_wnt5_x86-32_80224
DP_Virtual_wnt5_x86-32_708
DP_WebCam_wnt5_x86-32_80210
readme.txt
               1 File(s)            283 bytes
              33 Dir(s)               0 bytes free

I went into device manager, right clicked an unknown device and did update driver.  The hardware update wizard came up and I chose to install the software automatically.  I inserted my trusty driverpacks DVD-R that I made and let it search that bad boy.  This usually took awhile. Most of the time, it would find a driver for the unknown device.  I repeated this routine over and over until there were no more unknown devices.  I like to start with the most important things such as display adapters and network adapters, because it’s not easy to setup a computer in 640×480 with no internet.  Then I work on sound drivers and work my way down to the least important stuff such as Modems or Bluetooth. 

 

If there are still any unknown devices after checking windows update and driver packs, I check Driver Magician for updates.  I also used DriverGuide Toolkit before.  If that doesn’t work, then I guess you’re left with hunting search engines the manual way.

I don’t expect this process to be useful for much longer if Windows 7 makes the comeback that is needed.