I had a gateway laptop like this.... it's missing a SATA driver. Windows loader will load, then it won't boot into the final part of setup. Could not get M$ to tell me which version of xp would load for sure, gateway has sold the educational/corp laptop business to a company that is in Chapt 11 and won't sell me the original images of XP. M$, gateway or MPC will sell me or provide a disc image for me despite having the COA sticker on the laptop. I searched bittorrent for window xp for tablet edition, but it wasn't new enough to have the SATA driver. I ended up remastering the XP cd... but windows 7 loads perfectly.
Wes --- Sour grapes make the most whine. On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 21:51, Scott Miller <[email protected]> wrote: > My workbench PC, which does all of the programming and testing for just > about everything I build, crashed on Thursday. Hard. I had under a > minute's warning that something was going on, long enough to find out > that it'd been quietly dying long enough that backups hadn't been able > to run in a couple of days. > > It looks like the RAM is shot, and the motherboard had a couple of bad > electrolytic caps. In the process of dying it also managed to > thoroughly thrash the operating system (your computer is dying and > you're trying to shut down? Here, just let me install these 16 newly > downloaded patches before I shut off!) , but I think I recovered > everything important. > > No one carries any useful parts locally anymore, so I went out and got a > new machine. Like all new Windows machines, it's pre-installed with > Vista. Which won't run ANYTHING I need it to run. Not a problem, but > it also won't let me install XP. Never gets past the "Setup is > examining your hardware configuration" bit. Tried two different XP CDs > and two different CD ROM drives. I can boot my Ultimate Boot CD and run > a dozen different hard drive utilities, none of which can see the drive, > and most of which just lock up when they try. Tried adding a spare PCI > SATA controller, to no avail. Tried EIDE with another drive, too. > > Any suggestions on getting this thing to run XP? I've been out of the > PC repair business for a long time and I know I'm rusty, but I really > don't know why this thing is giving me so much trouble. > > My backup plan is to rebuild the old machine, which is going to mean > ordering some parts. I really need at least a couple of PCI slots (for > data acquisition boards and such) and a bunch of USB ports - my old > motherboard had an even dozen. I've got an AGP video card that handles > capture from the stereo microscope, but I can replace that if necessary. > Any ideas on where to find an ATX motherboard with a decent number of > PCI slots? > > Scott > > > > ------------------------------------ > > Yahoo! Groups Links > > > >
