Donwgrading Vista to XP on Acer Aspire E700 Duo 2-Quad core

Hey Everybody;

Giving you a straightforward method to the do the downgrade
successfully on that machine, that what I will do. I spent like 3
nights reading and trying everything and I wanted to share my
experience. I won't go into a lot of details but the main problem that
the RAID SATA driver, which is chipset dependent, is not loaded into
the XP setup CD and you need to feed it to the computer to let you
install XP successfully.

"Anderz" did exactly the same I did in his post in 2006:
http://www.msfn.org/board/Add-slipst...on-t77999.html

However, there was some checksum error on the CD after I modified the
files myself.

Project:
Modifying XP setup CD and create new one has everything you need

Tools you need:
Winrar, MagicISO, nLite, XP setup CD

Method:
1. Get the "Intel(R) ICH9 SATA AHCI Controller (Desktop/Server/
Workstation)" driver or whatever similar to your machine from Intel.
From Intel, choose Support and download -> Download Center -> Chipset -
> Desktop Chipset and choose you chipset. After you choose XP,
download "32-bit Floppy Configuration Utility for Intel(R) Matrix
Storage Manager" and install it. It will turn into an error since you
don't have a floppy, but that is OK. From the installation Directory,
get the file "F6flpy32.exe" and open it with Winrar. Whatever file
inside, open it with MagicISO and extract the driver files. Those are
the driver files you need to add to the CD or copy to a FDD and give
it the installation program by hitting F6 to install Third-Party RAID
drivers while running XP setup. I assume you don't have a FDD and you
don't want to waste your time trying different method.

2. With nLite, read the XP setup CD into some Directory. When you hit
next you find an option for adding a new driver. Hit this one and
click next and insert a single driver. It will ask you for the ".inf"
file. In the driver you got, there are 2 .inf files, IAAHCI.INF and
IASTOR.INF. Choose IASTOR.INF and that will be it. nLite will do the
same exact modification the everybody tried to do in the past but in
more professional way. After you finish, create an ISO file and burn
it into a new CD which will be installed smoothly and successfully.

One single important note: It is recommended to delete at least the
partition you will install the XP on and create it again. I did not
say you need to format the whole Hard disk, which is totally
unnecessarily. I kept the factory default partition on the hard drive
to I can get back to Vista at any time. I even left another partition
holding my data untouched.

Another note, surely you will get the XP drivers now from Acer.
Although that was for Acer, but this method will work on any computer
has Intel motherboard on it and if you get AMD driver , it will be
fine for AMD motherboards as well.

Another last notes, Some PCs, produced in 2007 comes with an option
for HDD operation mode in the BIOS and by modifying that you don't
need all of this. This method is for new BIOS configuration, where you
can't control the operation mode of the HDD and you are stuck.



Et Viola... You get yourself the lovely stable XP platform and run all
your software with no problem...

Good Luck