Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Tuesday 17 July 2007, 11:39 AM
XP for eXcluded People?
For reasons immaterial, I have recently acquired a Santa Rosa based laptop, hot off the production line from the Far East. Darn good one, too - and again for reasons immaterial, I need to put XP on it (neither Vista nor Linux being appropriate for the life it is to lead. Trust me on this.)
Normally, putting XP on a new machine is tedious but deterministic. Shove in the CD, boot up into a vanilla environment, load the drivers from hill, dale, CD and network, and job done.
Not this time. This being a Santa Rosa chipset, it has a SATA disk drive. XP being half a decade old knows nothing about SATA. The XP install declared that there was no hard disk and terminated. The option to load the drivers from floppy disk is only any good if you have a floppy disk (you'd have thought that having the option to load the drivers from USB key... but as I said, XP is half a decade old, and if Microsoft had kept it updated then it wouldn't be able to sell us Vista now, would it?).
There is, however, a standard procedure to cope with this. Take your XP CD, a marvellous utility called nLite and the right drivers, and you can create a new boot CD with the right bits added.
This assumes you can find the right drivers. The manufacturer's support site had all the drivers - for Vista. Not a sniff of XP. A long, long time later, having hunted down various files from various manufacturers, I had something that sort of worked, but more by way of being a project in progress than something you'd like to see on your desk.
Looking around, it seems as if there are two facts working against me: OEMs have assumed (or have been heavily encouraged to assume) that Santa Rosa equals Vista, and that plenty of people who don't want to or can't move to Vista have found that XP is not on the menu.
This is what happens when you try to synchronise a major platform change with commercially-mandated operating system changes - and how badly Microsoft's commercial model is out of sync with the needs of reality.
(At one stage in proceedings, I ran one of my preferred Linux live CD disk utilities, just to see what was going on. Needless to say, It Just Ran - gave me enhanced graphics, networking, hard disk, the lot. I nearly wept.)
PreviousComments on this post
Can't use Vista or Linux? And not XP either it would seem. Nice paperweight you've got there, Rupert ;-) !
It's OK, by now I've managed to assemble a fair imitation of a proper OEM XP distro. The final touch was doing a body swerve around the misspelled link to the only copy of the webcam driver in existence - and remembering the old "FTP into a web server" trick to bypass the virtual directory limitation.
Is done. Pwned.
I dont understand the link between the Santa Rosa chipset and SATA disk drives? Firstly Santa Rosa is the platform for the processor not the chipset. The chipset is a term usually used to refer to the north and south bridges on the motherboard which are used to send data to and from the processor and elements of the computer such as the graphics card, memory and other high speed components in the case of the north bridge, and slower peripheral buses such usb ports in the case of the south bridge. anyways now ive got that out of the way id just like to point out that SATA hard drives have been available for a long while and on plenty of previous chipsets and processor platforms. I my self have a laptop running on an intel core 2 duo t7200 2.0Ghz which runs on the previous processor platform (the name which escapes me) and the intel 945GM chipset, and well it has a sata hard drive and has not problems at all loading xp or vista for that matter so what ever the issue was it couldnt of been this.
On the plus side at least Vista will load drivers from CD & Memory sticks. Not that this helps if you can't find the drivers.
XP & 2K3 will load in drivers from a USB floppy usually (Maplins 9.99ish IIRC but don't forget the floppy disks) but with the exception of one elderly laptop all of the current machines at home don't have a floppy drive.
On the last bunch of servers I worked on the HP iLO system let you remote mount CDs & floppys so you don't even need to visit the machine room (I presume Intels AMT has the similar functionality) and I'd have thought the Santa Rosa based laptops would have this in.
