"Bill" wrote in message
...
I have an Acer Aspire L3600 mini PC, a great little second PC but for the
fact that it came with Vista Home Premium pre-installed in a "hidden" part
of 'D'. It has a built in facility where 'C' can be wiped completely
clean and restored to its factory default condition, data etc on 'D'
hopefully being untouched.
I don't like Vista much and would prefer to install my full retail version
of Win XP on this PC. I don't mind giving up Vista completely.
Acer's support is OK as far as it goes but they make it clear that they do
NOT recommend this course of action ,saying that they do not support
downgrading the unit with anything other than what came pre-installed on
the machine. They warn of the risk of "product failure".
If the 'downgrade ' to Win XP can technically be done I'm willing to take
the risk but need a bit more help on the mechanics of doing it. I have
installed OSs on other PCs from scratch but this process, i.e. totally
removing a pre-installed OS which is in some hidden and protected part of
the hard drive, appears to be rather more involved and I'm way out of my
comfort zone! I need help and advice.
Acer say that to run XP I will need to create a bootable disk with SATA
drivers otherwise Windows will not detect the hard drive when the CD is
run. I think I've tracked these down on their download site, at least in
the driver download section these were the only ones to show up.
What's come up are a total of 6 for Chipset, Audio, Lan, Modem, VGA and
Wireless Lan. Each one is in a zipped folder.
Out of interest I compared these to the drivers listed for the
pre-installed version of Vista. The chipset version number is identical
to the XP version but the others have different version numbers and there
is a additional TV driver for Vista Home Premium (the L3600 is media
centre enabled).
So,
1. Are these 6 drivers in fact the SATA drivers Acer are referring to?
2. How do I create the bootable disk they refer to. When I've
installed an OS in the past I've used a floppy which was inserted early
during the install process when prompted to do so. I don't recall
there being 6 separate drivers though.
I have an external floppy disk drive and wonder whether this could
be used in this case? If not can anyone tell me how to do it and what the
procedure is when installing XP.
3. Is the removal of the pre-installed material simply a question of
formatting the entire hard drive? I thought of abandoning the idea of
having two partitions, 'C' and 'D' and, on this PC, using external drives
for all data storage.
4. Is there anything else of which I should be aware?
Regards,
Bill
Looking at the readme in the chipset drivers zip, it contains the SATA
driver and instructions on how to pre-load it before the OS. I didn't read
the whole thing in depth, but it looks like you need the XP OEM CD to do it.
IIRC, XP service pack 3 has SATA drivers included, so if you have an
installation CD with XP SP3 on it, you'll be able to do the install without
needing to load the SATA drivers yourself. (I'm sure someone will correct me
if I'm incorrect.)
If your XP CD is SP1a or SP2, you can slipstream SP3 with it and create a
new bootable installation CD that will have the same results. Here's a link
describing the process:
How to Slipstream Windows XP Service Pack 3
http://www.howtohaven.com/system/sli...e-pack-3.shtml
If it were me, since you'll have to format your HDD to do the installation,
I'd do a disk image before attempting any of this. That way, if it all goes
horribly wrong, you can restore the image without having to reinstall all
your programs. There are a number of free imaging programs that will work
fine for you; just do a Google, Bing, or Yahoo for them.
Or if a new drive isn't too expensive or out of your budget range, just
start with a fresh drive and put your old one on a shelf for emergency
purposes. Then, if everything works out OK, you can always use it for a
backup drive. That's what I did when I upgraded from Vista to Win7 on my
notebook. I imaged my installed drive to a new one, then put it in the
notebook to be sure it worked, then upgraded to Win7. Now I have it running,
and a spare on the shelf if this one gets damaged. But that's just me; I
don't trust the integrity of notebook drives that much, and I'm careful not
to bang it around.
Download and extract all the driver files to a CD before you start this
project. After the XP installation and before connecting to the internet,
install all the drivers and see if they work OK. Then you can set up your
firewall and other security measures before connecting to the net and
getting all the XP security updates.
It's great that this is a second PC since then you won't feel rushed to
complete this. Rushing is one of the greatest creators of errors in a
project like this :-) Certainly sounds like a fun thing to try! Best of
luck!
--
SC Tom