My gateway laptop w6501 had a hard drive failure a few weeks back, but since I had a protection plan best buy installed a new one for me. Long story short, I now have a drive w no os on it. Originally it came w vista, but now I want to install xp on it. The cd spins up, but on the xp load screen, it eventually gets to a place that says press enter to install windows, r ro repair a previous copy and f3 to exit. When I hit enter it says it can’t find a hard drive to install windows on. The BIOS seems to be finding the drive ok.
Is there some hardware config that would be preventing xp from installing? The HD itself is compatible w xp.
Yes. your drive is likely SATA and XP cannot handle SATA drives on its own. You can get around this in two ways:
Either have the SATA drivers on a floppy disk and press F6 right at the start to load that driver.
Or go into the BIOS and change the SATA mode to Compatible.
However, I can’t find a W6501 on Gateway’s website. There’s no W series and the nearest laptop I can find is a 6510, which is very old. Are you sure that model no is correct?
The laptop is about two years old. It might be w650; the one looks a little odd and might just be a vertical line, or it might be an ‘i.’ The HD is sata, but I don’t see where in the bios to change the sata mode. Am I just missing it, or do i just need the drivers? Do you know where I can get those, and can I load them through a USB drive? The computer doesn’t have a floppy drive.
You should be able to load the drivers on a USB memory stick if the BIOS has an option for floppy emulation. But SATA compatability mode is the simplest way to proceed. Check your manuals.
As a third option, if you can get a CD of XP with SP3 slipstreamed, you’ll be fine.