Challenges and Work-Arounds With Windows XP
Joe M posted in Home Support on January 18th, 2010
Even though I try to avoid it…
I have a couple of friends that inevitably hose their machines, about every 4 or 5 months.
Seems like there is always something.
I finish one machine, then get asked to fix another.
I usually keep my mouth shut… but somehow, I wind up with a stack of machines.
I found myself, this time, working on a laptop.
Somehow, the wife of my friend had managed to knock it off the coffee table.
When I got it… I tried to boot it up.
The hard drive was completely dead.
Taking a look around, I planned on ordering one, and getting it delivered by mail.
Going out to Walmart, over the weekend, I found a small Seagate 250 GB external drive ($50).
On a whim, I bought the drive and got it home.
I took it out of the package, and found that I could easily remove it from the plastic casing.
To my assurance, there was a 2.5 inch laptop drive, SATA, hidden inside.
I replaced the drive in the laptop with it, and put it all back together.
Everything was smooth.
I stuck in my Windows XP CD, to re-install the OS.
The original XP OS was on the orignal drive, which was now dead.
Booting from the CD, I was reminded, that XP does not come with SATA drivers natively.
I had to download the SATA drivers, from the manufacturer website.
The next challenge?
I found that the laptop did not have a floppy.
I copied the drivers to a floppy, and plugged in my USB floppy drive.
During the initial load of the XP install, I pressed F6 and had to manually load the SATA drivers.
The crazy thing is… the only way to load the drivers is from a floppy.
The XP install won’t allow you to pull the drivers from anywhere, but a floppy drive!
After all those gyrations… the machine is humming along.