Frikkin doozie

[surfersaiyan]

hi guys, bit of a story here.

i was given a panasonic toughbook W7 and it had Vista Business and all the previous owners crap on there.

now, i love a bit of XP pro so decided to wipe and start again.

but the problems started when the installer couldn't find the C drive to install to. so in the interim i decided to delete all the previous users crap manually and just get on with it until i found a solution to installing XP.

there was some stupid Samsung Studio something on there which simply refused to uninstall itself so i employed Revo to help me out. It succeeded in mucking up things worse.

i ended up with a constantly recurring NetSelector error and nothing would run. i could get desktop but nothing would run.

so, annoying me even worse now, i embarked on a wipe and reinstall.

i figured out that the XP disc couldn't find the C drive because it is SATA. so i used nLite to insert the SATA drivers into XP and managed to get it formatting and installing.

but now every time i try to start the computer i get the following message:

Stop: 0x7b (blah blah blah).

it seems probably the sata drivers were good to get the install going but will need to be set to run every time windows starts.. (maybe?) and just would appreciate any help..

is it just me?:blackeye:

 

[Lokalaskurar]

Maybe not much of a help here, but XP has native SATA support. Additional SATA drivers were only needed for Windows ME and Windows 2000.

Or third-party drivers if you ran it on Win 98SE...

You know what? That drive might actually be locked to the Vista Business OS. And that "lock" is often because of either a "security card" or the boot-section of the harddrive. I once bought a computer from a school, which had a security card inside so that kidz wouldn't mess with the software and wipe the C:\ partition from time to time. Anyway, I removed the card, but the computer would all of a sudden not work. So I had to wipe the boot-section of the harddrive using a software called "HDKill 3". It might actually be illegal to own in the US.... I don't know to be honest.

As it's a laptop, the Panasonic W7, let's hope it's not OS-locked or anything like that.

All in all, not much of help I admit, but XP has native SATA support, and sometimes computers tend to be locked to an OS, especially this Business type.

 

[superty12]

Not sure if this site will help, but here it is.

 

[surfersaiyan]

thanks for the replies guys!

in the end i was tearing my hair out and just opted to DL a copy of Vista Business. installed and all working fine. i'm pretty sure its not OS Locked or anything like that.

the XP pro i usually like to run is a stripped out (performance) edition and may have had the SATA support removed in order to reduce size / increase performance.

using nLite was such a great experience for me since i can now customise my own installs in the future.

but having read the page suggested by superty12 (section 7) it would seem that XP needs some kind of driver in order to access the SATA C drive during boot, and that was not happening.

since the laptop will probably be mostly used by my missus i'm not really concerned with the performance issues of vista and i have another gig of ram on order anyway (now 1gb - will be 2gb).

just to get her crap out of my computer so i can give it the full XP (long overdue!) kick in the guts will be great.

thanks again...