here's my dilemmna..i have a friend who called a few hours ago..he just got a gateway laptop(me3705) and he immediately wanted to dump vista off the HD and he did but...he tried to install 3 different versions of xp and he keeps getting the same error message after the xp format screen in the beginning..something to the effect of.."memory dump" or something similiar...when he reinstalls his vista..it goes w/o a hitch..can anyone out there help on a way to install xp on this system?

his specs are...1.6ghz opteron or similiar/100 sata HD and 1gb of RAM

thanx

Does it have an IESA configuration partition on the HD?
Backup the partition & delete the EISA config partition, then try.
Might help :|

thanks debro...here's what he said he did...he said there are 2 partitions on the HD..one is 83gb's the other is 9gb's...i'm guessing the 9 is a restore or backup etc...he did exactly as you said and deleted the partitions and tried to make 1 hd...it wouldn't work...it won't let him delete either partition....what is this? is this a gateway issue or a Vista issue? i'm certainly no expert in this stuff but i'm pretty sure you can format a HD w/ 0 partitions and slap xp on it....we're both stumped here..any ideas?

Can he get into some sort of BIOS? Some of these laptops even have you locked out of BIOS. If he can get in there, look for boot option settings and recovery settings.

I'm completely in the dark with Vista, but is it tied to the hardware? It's supposed to have all sorts of protections built in. Lord help us, but maybe the hardware will only function with Vista.

If he can boot to a floppy or CD, he should be able to use any number of tools to format and partition the hard drive.

Memory dump sounds like a driver issue, which would only occur after files have been copied to the drive and XP is starting up. Maybe he needs a SATA controller driver or something to F6 before the install.

Memory Dump in XP Pro is in the Device Manager.

i'll call him now and have him try these things

thanx

You can also use "The Ultimate BootCD" (approx 100MB Dl, I think) to boot the PC and use the included utils to wipe the partitions & set them up as you want

Or you can just run the Suse 10.2 linux installer (or Live CD) which will let you trash the HD partitions as you wish. - But it's a 4GB download

WinXP will fix up the MBR, as it needs, upon installation, no matter what vista tricks are happening, and will format the partitions clean

The bios is not accessible by Vista or Winxp. The bios just sets the first (boot) drive, and tells the CPU to request the first sectors of the (boot) drive, which is the MBR.

If you have multiple HD's, you can use multiple MBR's & install one OS on one drive & another OS on another (or let Vista/Linux handle everything). Switching the boot/1st drive in the bios will make that HD active.

I've done both.
I have WinXP on the original HD. Then I've switched to another (boot) drive in the bios & installed SUSE linux.

Linux has conveniently picked up WinXP on the other drive also, but has installed the boot loader into the MBR of it's own HD, not the winXP drive.

If for any reason, the linux boot loader stops working, I can quickly change the boot order in bios & fire up WinXP from the original HD.

Vista should be the same as linux. Change the first/boot HD, install it & the MBR of the first/boot HD only will be affected, not every drive, which is a common misperception.


Be careful with SATA as you can use native SATA/PATA emulation which can confuse WinXP (and likely Vista too). Linux doesn't seem to care much and will boot regardless, but drive mounts can go awol, while they are still in the system