Upgrading From Vista to Windows XP

Yep – many people refer to moving from Vista to XP as “downgrading”, but I think it’s more accurately referred to as an upgrade. I recently purchased a Toshiba L305-S5913 laptop – nothing particularly fancy, it was a good deal at $499.95 – but it was running Vista Home Premium, which I have no particular interest in using. I feel that I’m probably in the majority of informed computer users – XP Pro is a perfectly suitable OS – while Vista is wonderful if you like ‘eye-candy‘. I suspect that Vista is only becoming more ‘popular’ because it’s downright difficult to find new computers that have XP as an option, let alone already the primary OS.

My first step was to locate a decently sized HD – as the Toshiba only came with a 160Gb drive – and I wanted to be able to run several VMWare partitions – I plan to use the laptop as a test platform for this website – so I need a Linux OS, together with PHP & MySql running – in order to pre-test different Drupal scripts.  So I found a 500Gb Samsung HD for $150 – and found out that I didn’t have to disassemble the laptop – the drive is hidden behind a cover with just two screws, which made it easy to change the hard drive.

But my first step after digging up my XP Pro CD, and having the new HD ready to go – was to do a complete backup of the current HD – who knows, someday I may want to run Vista – although I personally consider that possibility as rather unlikely. Then I verified that the Toshiba website had all the XP drivers, and I downloaded everything I could find related to XP and burned it to a CD. Then I also looked around for some good Fdisk/Partition type aids, including the Sony utility for the HD I’d purchased.

My first major problem was that the “DVD SuperMulti Drive” wasn’t being recognized by any of the DOS Boot CD’s I had – I couldn’t boot into anything in order to run the Samsung utility. So I looked around the net a wee bit (did I mention that I was next to a working desktop connected to the Internet? I’d never try to upgrade without some connection to the Internet!), and found something called “Hiren’s Boot Disk” – which was capable of running from a Flash Drive. It also included the Samsung utility, as well as many other excellent Fdisk & Partition aids.

Next I spent several hours trying to get everything to work – I kept thinking that the HD was correctly Fdisked & Partitioned, but the XP Pro install CD kept stopping with the infamous BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). Finally, I was rooting through the BIOS – and came across a possible fix, I changed the “SATA Controller Mode” from AHCI mode to “Compatibility” mode – this turned out to be the key, XP doesn’t natively support the AHCI mode as Vista does. Although I’ve looked into restoring AHCI mode – it doesn’t appear to offer any major advantages.  It seems that companies aren’t interested in continuing to support XP – and when given the chance, will support Vista only.  This bodes ill for the future.

After upgrading my Vista to XP Pro – I spent a few hours installing all of the drivers I’d previously burned to CD.  I was quite happy to see the wireless network back up and working, as well as my USB ports.  Nice to look in the System Hardware, and not see any ‘yellow question marks’…

To anyone planning to upgrade their laptop, here’s my suggestions boiled down from my experience:

1. Backup everything – you may need to go back to the original setup.
2. Collect all the drivers – burn ‘em to a CD so that you’ll be ready to re-install ‘em.
3. Get Hiren’s Boot Disk – it’s a pretty handy, one stop resource for fixing/repairing/partitioning your HD.
4. Keep an eye on your SATA compatibility mode in the BIOS.
5. Be sure to upgrade next to another computer connected to the Internet – you’ll always end up running into problems you didn’t expect – and the answers are on the net!

Good luck upgrading!

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