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How to install a driver in XP Setup without a floppy drive ???

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Carol Haynes:
I am trying to get rid of Vista on my Notebook computer and install XP instead.

The trouble is that booting from the setup CD gets to a point where it says there are no hard drives present.

I have downloaded a floppy based driver for the Notebook motherboard which you are supposed to use as an 'F6' driver disc during setup.

Unfortunately I haven't got a floppy drive on the Notebook and when I get to the stage where it asks for the driver disc I just get 'can't find a floppy drive'.

Anyone any idea how to supply a driver to windows setup without a floppy drive (I have tried using a CDROM with the driver but that doesn't work)?

mwb1100:
I ran into a similar problem helping my father-in-law to 'downgrade' to XP from Vista.  It turned out that having the driver installed on the XP CD-ROM was not the solution to his problem - I had to go into the BIOS setup and change some setting on the SATA drive controller.  This was an HP Desktop computer, but maybe something similar will apply to your setup.

I don't recall the exact terminology for the setting, but it had something to do with turning on SATA IDE emulation or turning off SATA native mode or something (gee, I'm not sure how helpful I'm being here...).

This CNET thread gives the general idea:  http://forums.cnet.com/5208-12546_102-0.html?forumID=133&threadID=243153&messageID=2665617

If you do really need a driver for the XP install, the 'F6' portion of XP setup can only deal with floppies that can be accessed via the BIOS routines, so you'll need to either get a USB Floppy that can be accessed by the installer (not all BIOSes support this) or you need to build an XP Setup CD-ROM that has the driver integrated into it so the setup will find the driver without having to go through the 'F6' bit.  You can use using something like nLite to do this: 

http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/2008/02/08/how-to-integrate-floppy-sata-raid-driver-into-windows-xp-cd/


Note that I went the nLite-integrated driver route initially on my in-law's machine, but that didn't help.  The XP driver needed the SATA interface to be set up by the BIOS correctly, after that the standard XP drivers worked just fine (I didn't need the nLite customized version).

mwb1100:
Oh, and I should mention that some computer OEMs will send you an XP 'downgrade' CD if you request it.  Not all will, and those that will may not do it for all models, but it's probably worth an inquiry.

pip2kk:
http://www.nliteos.com/

that app will be able to load 3rd party drivers onto a xp cd...or more appropriately a iso that can be burned to cd

Carol Haynes:
Thanks all - actually I found nlite soon after posting the original messge. Worked a treat.

For those not in the know nlite takes the original Windows Installation Media, rips it to the hard disk, integrates the required drivers (and allows lots of installation tweaks and customisations if you want them) and then lets you build a new ISO file which when burned to a CDROM can be used as an installer.

It hasn't got the most user friendly of interfaces but it works like a charm.

For Vista there is a similar program vlite (but that is still in its early stages of development).

nlite supports windows 2000, XP and 2003.

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