Windows Vista Acer states "known issue" affects installing XP on Vista drive. Huh?

I've just discovered that I got laptops mixed up. It's not the Acer that has the extra second partition table, that's actually on a Samsung Laptop. The Acer only has a fairly standard custom boot code in the MBR that can recognise Alt-F10 at bootup to take you to the recovery utility. The only other thing out of the ordinary is that the Vista partition will appear as unformatted to most third party partitioning apps and not NTFS as it actually is. Neither of these things should have had any bearing on being able to install XP.

I may be seeing the Acer laptop again to set up a Vista and XP dual boot on it "“ or as least try to.

 

Well I got that Acer Extensa and installed XP straight off on the first attempt. The XP CD saw the hard drive without needing SATA drivers and that got me thinking that perhaps it had something to do with SP2 being included on the disk. So I tried again with an original release of XP and could not even fully load the PE environment as it would always bluescreen with an error "“ which pointed to a video driver problem.

Did your XP disk have SP2 on it Masonite?

 

Yes, Mac - it was an SP2 install disc.

 

Oh well, another theory shot down in flames.

 

LOL. But isn't that what most of computing is about? A constant search for theories that provide the right answers? Personally I believe that we're in the stone age of computing; our gear is pretty much Fred-Flintstone-ish.

I can see a time when computers will be fail-safe, unbreakable and almost indistinguishable (except for appearance) from human beings (and except for being less whimsical).

This will happen, if only because there's a need for it to be so, and humans always get what they want (if not always what they need).

Wow, that's fairly deep stuff for a Monday morning, isn't it ?

Must have been stirred up by our loss to France. Oh, and my condolences to the Scots :-(

 

Hi

What's interesting is that it does not give a 07B error when it reboots after TxtMode.
Let's tell a little tale. (All of it happened with XP-sp2, with TXTmode drivers slipstreamed to the CD.)
Last year, we heard that machines with an intel chipset could do a funny on us. When a hard disk was partitioned in "standard" IDE mode, which can be done with the BIOS set to RAID or IDE, all was well, and setup finished.
Then, BIOS option was changed to AHCI.
Setup ran again, it sees the hard drive, repartitions, formats, copies the goodies, and when it restarts, it sees no drive.
When this was reported, we looked for days, trying to figure out if it were the drivers.
Then I tried it myself, and could reproduce this.
I actually had to Lowlevel the drive, to get it running in AHCI mode.

Another observance.
(This one is not likely to happen to a Laptop user.)
When a member drive of an array is separated from the array, and one launches setup, one can sometimes see the drive, it appears to correctly format etc, and when it restarts, nada, no drive.
When one pays closer attention, one sees that txtmode reported the array size, instead of the hard disk size.
Wrong geometry..
The solution was to hook it up to a raid capable chip, and remove the array information.
(Incidentally, some cards or chips with Raid BIOS can "Lowlevel" a hard drive just fine.).

Whatever it is that survives diskwipe tools, could also reside in the drive's firmware. (my personal theory.)
And that does not survive resetting it from within a low level capable BIOS.

Anyway, I learned that Acer made it hard, ant this could be just what happens to the Acer travelmate 6292 users asking us to help them over at driverpacks.net.

Thanks for this.
Kind regards, Jaak.

 

Good comment, Jaak, thanks for that

 

Hi again.

I mentioned slipstreaming TXTmode drivers to the source CD.
Every time you have to use a floppy to load TxTmode driver, you are wasting time. One can actually build a XP-CDROM with additional TXTmode drivers slipstreamed into it.

One can do this with nLite (if you need to slipstream only one or maybe a couple drivers.), and the process is amazingly simple.

I also mentioned driverpacks.net.
That project is about slipstreaming driver archives into XP setup CD (and 2000/2003 too) and can also make a TXTmode plugin for UBCD4WIN.
I started using that, and then helped improve it.
It's not totally bug free, but it has an enormous set of drivers, which helps make an unattended disc install a lot easier.
One thing we face are chips with same hardware ID and different BIOS, which use a different driver, which has all the same HWIDs in them than what an older or newer driver has.
Thank goodness this is not true for all drivers.
I must mention this, because the driver you put on floppy, can be for a wrong BIOS.
(if it has SiLicon Image, you run that risk.)
Reports I saw indicate that older drivers, intended for older BIOS versions, work on never BIOS. the other way round, is usually not going to work.
So, keep that in mind when you make a floppy. The latest is NOT always the best.