- Joined
- Apr 20, 2008
- Location
- Toronto, Canada
I have a Dell Inspiron 1525 with Vista Home Basic. The laptop isn't powerful enough to handle Vista in my opinion so I wish to install XP on it. Even though it runs fine, from time to time under multi-tasking it slows down alot... and Ive always preferred XP over Vista anyway.
The main SATA partition which holds Vista is 99GB and the rest (9.8GB) is empty. There is too much data to back up so is there any way I can downgrade to XP without having to format the Vista partition?
I tried installing XP on the other 9.8GB partition but the setup CP refuses to recognize any hard drive on my laptop. I think the problem is with SATA drivers but unfortunately I do not have a floppy disk drive so I can install them using the XP setup on boot (by installing third party drivers after pressing F6).
I also tried disabling AHCI option from within the BIOS to ATA but it gave me a warning saying I might not be able to boot into Vista anymore so I didn't take any risk. Any ideas as to how should install XP on the laptop?
Specs:
Core 2 Duo T5450 1.66GHz
1GB DDR2 RAM
120GB HDD SATA
The main SATA partition which holds Vista is 99GB and the rest (9.8GB) is empty. There is too much data to back up so is there any way I can downgrade to XP without having to format the Vista partition?
I tried installing XP on the other 9.8GB partition but the setup CP refuses to recognize any hard drive on my laptop. I think the problem is with SATA drivers but unfortunately I do not have a floppy disk drive so I can install them using the XP setup on boot (by installing third party drivers after pressing F6).
I also tried disabling AHCI option from within the BIOS to ATA but it gave me a warning saying I might not be able to boot into Vista anymore so I didn't take any risk. Any ideas as to how should install XP on the laptop?
Specs:
Core 2 Duo T5450 1.66GHz
1GB DDR2 RAM
120GB HDD SATA