How do I get rid of Vista and install XP?

[wheeloftime]

My pc died on me and due to a lack of spare cash I bought a cheap pc. It is a AMD Athlon 64X2 dual core 3600+ and it came with only 500mb ram. It also has vista pre-installed. The pc was so slow, I thought this was probably due to the lack of ram, so I bought another 2g ram (total 2.5g ram) but the machine still takes ages to do anything. I can't surf without turning utorrent off etc.
I have a legit copy of XP pro and would like to install it on this pc instead of vista. I have formated pc's before and installed new operating systems and have downloaded all the xp drivers for my current pc.
The problem is my pc uses sata drives and I have read that xp cannot boot on a sata drive as it does not contain the drivers for sata. I do have an old floppy disc that came with a raid card that contains sata drivers, but my pc does not have a floppy drive so I can't boot from the floppy to load the drivers first.
I was wondering whether it would be possible to copy the drivers from the floppy to a sd card and load them by booting from the built in card reader prior to booting from the xp disc.
The pc has 2 drives, is there any way I could install xp on the second drive, load all the xp drivers and then use acronis to clone the drive onto the main drive, or create an image of the second drive and unpack it to the main drive.
I don't know that much about pc's so what I am proposing may sound stupid, in the end I may have to get hold of a floppy drive and temporarily install that in my pc but I wondered if there was another way.

[saqib]

use hiren boot cd , format ur drive , where u installed vista , then install xp

[mbucari1]

use hiren boot cd , format ur drive , where u installed vista , then install xp

Ya know, XP's installer DOES have a format function. EVERY OS installation has one.

[tesco]

use hiren boot cd , format ur drive , where u installed vista , then install xp

Ya know, XP's installer DOES have a format function. EVERY OS installation has one.

not true.
But yes most modern os installers have it.


@wheeloftime, Just boot from your xp disc and see if the installer reconizes your hard drive.
It most likely will.
If not then you need to use the sata driver floppy that came with your motherboard. If it didn't come with one then search google for the ones for your model motherboard.
I don't think you'll have any problem though...

[clocker]

@wheeloftime, Just boot from your xp disc and see if the installer reconizes your hard drive.
It most likely will.

Maybe, maybe not...depends on the motherboard.
Check in the BIOS to see if your SATA controller offers a "IDE" or "Legacy" mode- if so, it will present your hard drives to XP as though they were PATA drives and the install should go forward. If you can't tell, just begin the install and see if it recognizes the hard drive.

If not, you can use nLite to build a XP install disk with the necessary drivers slipstreamed.
You'll have to do this from within Vista, burn the image to disk and then install XP.

[wheeloftime]

Thanks for all the help. I ended up finding something on another forum that helped. I began loading xp and when it got to 'press f6 to install RAID/SATA drivers' I was able to navigate to a usb flash drive which I had loaded the raid drivers onto.
Thanks again for the replies.

[Qlix]

You go girl. Vista sucks.