Hi all

I recently bought HP Pavilion DV 6599 Special Edition, and it has a Windows Vista pre-installed on it.

I want to remove vista, and reinstall my good'ol XP again, but when I run setup from the bootable XP disk, the setup says it could not detect any harddisks !!!

Any recommendations dear sirs/guys?

first of all, you might want to back up your vista activation information so you can reinstall it later (see this.) next, go to start > run, type in "dxdiag" and hit enter -- tell us the information listed in the "System Information" frameset in that window.

I would suspect you have a SATA chipset that requires a third party driver with XP (pretty much all of them other than integrated SATA of Intel mainboard chipsets).  You will need to press F6 during Windows XP setup and insert a floppy with the appropriate driver.  Since your computer appears to be a laptop, chances are you don't even have a floppy drive -- and that is the only supported medium. 

You will probably be best off just learning to live with Vista.

I had this problem with my dv6330, but I got around it, cause I'm amazing .

Short Guide
Tools Required:
SATA Drivers. Probably get them from Intel
An unmodified Windows XP CD.
nLite

Anyway, what you need to do, is find the drivers for your SATA chipset (mine were included in the Intel Chipset driver, which I downloaded from Intel rather than the HP site since they only had Vista drivers), and extract them to a folder somewhere.

Next, you need to stick the Windows XP CD in your drive, and then run nLite. You then need to follow the instructions to Integrate Drivers into nLite, and then point it to the location you extracted the drivers to. You may also need to check a box which says like "This driver is required during setup", or you might not. (I cannot remember.)

Follow the nLite instructions (you might need some help with this, depends how techy-literate you are). On the last part, make sure that you choose (Something like) "Make Bootable ISO image" and then burn the ISO image created to a CD with your favourite burning package.

Sounds fun? It'll probably take about an hour the first time you do it.

The chipset drivers available on HP website is only for windows vista.

Aren't I supposed to get XP drivers to integrate them with nlite?

If the answer is 'yes', then its not available on HP website, only vista is available.

Yes, I have the drivers, I don't think they're the same as the dv6330 though. All I done was download the chipset identifier from Intel and then downloaded the drivers for the chipset from the site.

Chipset Identification Program

Note, When you download the drivers you need to extract them to a folder.

Running Nlite works of .ini files for your drivers.
While your at it.

You might want to setup xp for unattended install to make your life extra simple.

If your XP cd doesn't have SP2 you might want to slip stream that on to your cd.

http://www.msfn.org/articles.php?action=show&showarticle=49

And also intergrate latest windows up dates after that to

Go here
http://www.ryanvm.net/msfn/

Download the update pack and the intergrator.

For nlite to work you need to copy ur xp disk files to your pc. so you run the intergrator and point it to xp folder then added the updates from the update pack.


Saves hassle after the install

thanks all, but I can't still find the SATA drivers for WinXP !!

Its so annoying really...