Mostly non-CoX problem...

Le sigh,

Long time no talk to you guys. Miss me? I've been playing some since 'premium' came along, which was nice since I've been out of work since November. Gave me something to do between interviews and resumes. Anyway, I'm picking up some contract work and to facilitate that I got an older workstation from a former employer for free. It's a Dell Precision 370, set up for CADD work. ATI FireGL card with 1MB, plenty of RAM. Might even be able to run CoX better than this laptop I'm playing on. (See, there *is* minimal CoX content here!)

Here's my problem.

The machine has 32-bit XP Pro installed, works fine. My version of AutoCAD 2011 is 64-bit. Due to broke-ness and not wanting to get into the whole Win7 upgrade dance right now, I'm trying to install XP Pro 64-bit. But when I try to boot from the install CD, setup can't find the flippin' hard drive and aborts the install. The Hard drive is a fairly common Western Digital - I find it hard to believe there's not a driver on the setup CD that would work.

I've always been impressed with the knowledge and skills of many of the folks on here - you've helped me out of many problems over the years. So I'm hoping someone here can shed some light on this.

Most likely it's not the hard drive, but rather the disk controller on your motherboard. Especially if it's a SATA drive, XP is old enough that it doesn't have drivers for those built in.

You've got a few options. The easiest is to check your BIOS settings and see if the controller has a Compatibility or Emulation mode. That will make it pretend to be an older ATA chip so that XP can see it. You may lose a tiny bit of performance in that mode, but it's very very slight, especially since it's unlikely that your drive supports NCQ anyway.

The other option is to find 64-bit XP drivers for your motherboard's disk controller. The manufacturer may have these, but 64-bit XP was pretty rare so they may not. When you find them you have to either put them on a floppy disk (yes, I said floppy) and tell XP setup to load them, or burn a new XP CD with the drivers slipstreamed in. nLite is a good tool for that.

It's been a long time since I had to do it, but if you Don't have an XP sp3 OS disc, then you need make one. When vista came out I bought this laptop and only had a copy of XP pre-SP1. It took me a week of reading online to get the right SATA drivers and instructions on how to Slipstream them onto the disc so that the drivers are loaded during boot and readible by the installation. I may have those links somewhere, but I've since acquired an XP sp3 disc so I'm not sure of the steps at this point.

(cue nearest tech guru ;-p)

Thanks Aries, but as someone else mentioned XP Pro 64bit doesn't have a SP3. Meanwhile I have gotten this thing working properly now. The compatibility mode that Codewalker pointed me to got me over the hump. :thumbup: Thanks, all!!!