I need some help after my disappointment with my very new laptop purchase ..... Toshiba Satellite Pro S300-2504, 160 GB 7200 rpm SATA hard drive, gigabit LAN, eSATA port, Vista Business, XP downgrade Disc ..... about which I believe is a perfect desktop capable laptop .... until I realized I'm apparently stuck with Vista Business unless I choose to over write C: with the included XP downgrade.
Apparently the so-called-techs at Toshiba do not understand their own business as I was assured the XP drivers would be in a folder on the Downgrade Disc ...... that I would be able to dual boot C:Vista Business (as shipped installed) and shrink the partition to install XP Pro on a D: partition (i.e. migrating my current XP product license from my to-be disabled laptop).
There appears to be a new driver distribution technique ...... as the Toshiba XP SATA drivers are encapsulated within or managed by a smart Setup.exe file that examines the computer system and aborts if incompatible hardware is detected ........ and the drivers cannot be extracted ...... even by the highly touted WinRar.
Toshiba-USA does not offer XP drivers for the laptop, but I had found all the XP drivers (.exe) at Toshiba-Europe. Likely a USA restriction negotiated by Microsoft ....... but Microsoft was unable to shanghai the European market.
So between Microsoft, Intel, Toshiba, et al ..... with SATA replacing PATA ...... it might appear as the days of slip-streaming for migration are limited ..... unless it can be figured how to embed a so-called intelligent executable SATA driver into the slip streamed disc ...... circumventing the F6 option as all newer laptops are floppy-less and with SATA hard drives. Of course you could buy a USB floppy, but nLite slipstreaming would seem to be a better choice ..... and either method still needs the elusive SATA drivers to get beyond the first blue screen Stop: 0x0000007B .....
Has anyone a solution ........ or is this a fatal driver software gotcha?
20081119-EE-VQP-45 - Hierarchy / EE_QW_2_20070628
