Problem installing XP on a Toshiba Satelite Laptop.

sculptor · 25 Nov 2009 at 21:52

A friend at work told me his son had messed up the Vista installation on his laptop. I have recently upgraded several of my pcs to Windows 7 and have a few spare XP OEM disks.
I said I could probably install XP on his sons laptop if he didnt mind not having Vista.
Ive had a go at installing XP but after the disc had run through the initial install of files the following error mesage appeared.

A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer. If this is the first time you've seen this stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again , follow these steps:
Check for viruses on your computer. Remove any newly installed hard drives or hard drive controllers. Check your hard drive to make sure it is properly configured and terminated. Run CHKDSK /F to check for hard drive corruption, and then restart your computer.

Technical information:
***STOP: 0X0000007B (0XF78D2524, 0XC0000034, 0X00000000, 0X00000000)

I am guessing there is a problem with the hard drive as the only time I have ever seen this message before is when a hard drive had failed.
However as it is a Toshiba laptop does my friend need a Toshiba installer disk in order to install Windows. PC World told him he would have to contact Toshiba and buy an installer disk (£30.00) from them and re-install Vista.
My attempt at installing XP seems to show that the hard drive is knackerd and even with a Toshiba disk he would not be able to install Vista.
Can anyone tell me if they think there is a problem with the hard drive or if by some magic the Toshiba installer disk would work.
sculptor.

davethe11 · 25 Nov 2009 at 21:55

first guess would be that the hard drive is sata, and the required drivers were not installed during the xp installation, if this is the case you could try going into the bios and setting sata drives to act as IDE drives and see if this works

theheyes · 25 Nov 2009 at 22:46

Problem is, even if you overcome this error it might not even activate as OEM licenses are non-transferable and are tied to your old hardware.

sculptor · 25 Nov 2009 at 22:46

Thanks davethe11,
checked the bios and there is a compatibility mode for SATA, treid it and its now loading XP.
Its the first laptop that Ive tried installing Windows on and I never would have thought of the hard drive controller not being compatible with XP, so glad there are many clever people on these forums.
Thanks again mate.
sculptor.

sculptor · 25 Nov 2009 at 22:56

Ive installed a few of my OEM XP disks on several rebuilds over the years since first buying them and so far (touch wood) Microsoft has always activated them. Sometimes had to phone but the activeation has always gone through.
Ill find out in a short time (fingers xxsd)
sculptor.

cokecan · 25 Nov 2009 at 23:14

sculptor said:
Ive installed a few of my OEM XP disks on several rebuilds over the years since first buying them and so far (touch wood) Microsoft has always activated them. Sometimes had to phone but the activeation has always gone through.
Ill find out in a short time (fingers xxsd)
sculptor.

it's not so much that they won't work but more that i think legally your not allowed to do this (regardless of whether it works)