Windows 7 What am I missing?

[Shady Janzeir]

Hello everyone,

This is my first post here, and I'm hoping that I can find the answers I need with what I'm sure is a vastly knowledgeable and extremely cool crowd.

So, here's what I'm trying to achieve. I have a Getac B300 laptop running W7Pro on a single partition. Through a rather bizarre mix of nostalgia and my love for sheer simplicity, I somehow got it into my head that I wanted to run an XP Pro installation on the same machine.

The next station of this (surely flawed ) thought process led me to wonder whether I could do just that with the already existing W7 installation. I got around to shrinking the C: partition, which netted me some 51 gigs of free space that I figured I could use to create a new partition on which to install XPPro. So far, so good.

As you'd expect by now, simply sticking the XP CD into the DVD drive and restarting the machine just won't work: I got the "XP can't see the hard drive" message. So, armed with Google as my friend, I ended up educating myself about how to use nLite to create a copy with integrated iaahci and iastor drivers. Problem is, Having prepared three copies already, after I start the installation sequence and the XP CD installer starts loading files, I'm ending up with the message "the file iastor.sys could not be found," even though I did make sure to include the file that I downloaded from somewhere in the integration process.

So what am I missing here? What am I doing wrong? (I know that the whole concept is "wrong," but there you have it.)

Here are some of the specs of the machine in question:

Getac B300
32-bit W7P SP1
320GB Toshiba MK2555GSX ATA HDD
3GB RAM
ICH8M chipset.

Just let me know what more information you need. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

[Mitchell_A]

Welcome back to the forums..
I've moved this to Windows 7 Installation and Upgrade since the tweaks forum is not for asking questions (and not our Windows XP section since it's usually dormant)

Thanks for your understanding,
Mitchell Anthony
Public Relations.

 

[Saltgrass]

Where did you download the file from, and do you remember which tutorial on making the slipstream media you used? What version of XP are you starting with..basic or SP1 or ?

Edit: Oh, and I probably should ask, do you have a Repair CD or a Windows 7 install DVD you can use when the Windows 7 boot gets messed up?

 

[Shady Janzeir]

Thanks Mitchell. First, some great news: it's all working brilliantly. I have dual boot to both 7 and XP, and I'm a happy camper!

Salt, I downloaded the file from here. This gentleman has a modified file that will work with ICH8 chipsets to make it possible for the XP installer to "see" the HDD (which is the exact same problem I ran into at first. I had been slipstreaming the wrong drivers, which caused me to waste a few perfectly good blank CDs. Oh well...)

After the idea worked its way into my twisted head, some of the tutorials Google spwed out were this and this, as well as the one above. There are plenty more for sure, but these were just about perfect.

The XP CD I used for a source for the slipstream was a copy that I borrowed from a friend after I had found out that a genuine copy I bought a few years back was lost. Thankfully, I had kept my genuine product key labels glued to the bottom of an old Thinkpad T42 that died and went to heaven some time ago. And yes, I do have my original genuine W7Pro DVD, which I always keep handy.

Shady