Sorry I haven’t gotten back to you earlier, it’s been a couple of very busy days and I haven’t had the chance to get near a computer.

Uhmm, let’s see here… You’re correct, it’s perfectly normal for all the options except “Install Windows XP” to be there when you run the ISO from within Windows. It also sounds like you know that you have to change the boot options in the BIOS in order get the laptop to see the disc. You mentioned that you disabled the HDD, but I’m wondering if perhaps the optical drive is still not the first item that the BIOS tries to boot from. Try disabling every boot options, except for the optical drive, and make sure that the optical drive is at the very top of the boot order list. Oh, and remember to “Save and Quit,” so that the changes are saved.

From the given information I can’t tell if nLite properly created the ISO. If the drivers have not been properly split-streamed into the XP installation disc, then the disc should still behave exactly like any regular installation disc; that is, it will boot from the CD, and then tell you that it failed to find a HDD — which is the problem that we were originally trying to solve.

To make sure that the disc is functional, you could try and see what happens when you insert the disc into another computer — a computer that will allow you to boot from the installation disc; no need to install anything, since all we want to know is whether or not the disc appears to be valid. Along those same lines, you could also just boot into Vista and check out the files one the disc. Do they look like they might be the files necessary to install XP.

Oh, and remember that you do not want the disc to simple contain one file, i.e. the ISO image file. ISO images are essentially containers for the files that used to be a disc, and so it wouldn’t make sense to simply place this container on a blank disc, because then the new disc would not look like the original CD. You want the contents of the container, not the container itself, to be burned onto the blank disc — that’s what Alcohol 120% does. If you actually burn the .ISO onto a disc, then the BIOS will not be able to recognize it as an installation disc, and after a few seconds of trying to access it, the PC will give up and move on to the next item in the boot order list, most likely the HDD containing Vista.

I hope this helps…

I used the last option.
Stupid of me that I didn’t got that idea!
I used another PC with XP and tried to download and use nLite there.
I Installed nLite and now I can follow all the steps. I imported
the SATA drivers and copied my XP CD. After all those steps I created an ISO-file.
On my Laptop I imported the ISO in Alcohol 120% and tried the setup.
All options except ‘Install windows XP’ were available. I don’t know if that’s common,
because you need to burn and reboot, after that you have to install the OS I suppose?
I burnt the ISO and tried to install, but it starts VISTA as normal, or when I disable the HDD with VISTA,
it says it can’t find an Operating System.
Any Ideas what the problem is?
Do I need to enable/disable specific things (I have nVidia BOOT agent, DVD and HDD with VISTA installed)
or did I select a wrong Driver, if that’s the case I need to try other drivers on a DVD RW…
It seems to work with this program, so I keep trying.

Hope you know what possible mistakes Ihave made, so that I can Install XP after all!

Grtz,

DT

After a fairly lengthy search for a possible solution, I failed to come up with a solution that is sure to work. However, that being said, there are a few things that you might want to try:

1) Make sure that your Vista installation is completely up to date — perhaps Microsoft fixed this issue with a recent patch, who knows…

2) Make sure that you have the latest version of the .NET Framework installed — link: http://tinyurl.com/758p8

3) It is also possible that you are experiencing a problem with a feature in Vista known as DEP (Data Execution Prevention). Here is a link to a forum post about how to disable DEP: http://tinyurl.com/5g9r5d

4) Another possible cause of this problem, although I consider it unlikely, may be a virus of some sort — try running a full system scan with an Anti-Virus client. AVG is good one, free too: http://free.avg.com/

If none of the above works, then your Vista installation may be corrupted, in which case it might be worth trying to reinstall Vista (if you have the installation CD, that is). If this is not an option, and you still want XP, perhaps you can convince a friend to install NLite and to create the XP installation disc for you. And, of course, if you have any more question, please let me know…

Tim

This is my Laptop:
http://www.laptopplus.nl/product-details/18-Inch-laptop-met-Full-HD/3847/
(only: 2,4 Ghz, 4GB DDR2, 320 GB SATA)

Hope I can get XP on my Laptop, I need it so hard but no information from the internet helps…
Hope you can help me out!

Grtz,
DT

So the problem you’re having is that the machine is booting off of the hard drive and not from the optical drive, which presumably has the XP installation disc in it, correct?

As you obviously know, the boot order is what matters here; the PC should check to see if it can boot off of the optical drive, and if not, it should try the hard drive. Are you sure that when you quit the BIOS you selected the “Save and Exit” option, instead of just “Exit”? If you didn’t save the changes, they obviously won’t take effect.

If you’re sure that you saved the changes, you can try placing the hard drive at the very bottom of your boot list, i.e., place all optical drives and all USB ports above it.

If it still refuses to work after that, you can try it with a flash drive instead of an optical disc. Grab a blank flash drive and copy the installation files onto that. If you choose to do this, it’s important that there be nothing else on the drive except the installation files. And, also, keep in mind that simply saving the ISO image onto the flash drive won’t do the trick, you’ll have to save the files extracted from the ISO image onto the flash drive. You can use an app like WinRar to unzip the ISO file to get to the files contained within.

If you’re still having problems after all this, please let me know, and we can try to figure out a solution.

Hope this helps!

latop brand: SONY VAIO
BIOS PHOENIX
Model: VGN-NR11M/S

kindly provide a solution.