Dual Boot Vista/XP HP DV9394EA Laptop

[Archangel42069]

I have a customer who needs to dual boot for work, which shouldn't be a problem. However, there are a few hurdles I can't figure out how to overcome.

-Vista came preinstalled, no Vista disk, only HP restore disk.

-XP Was installed and working before the customer brought the computer in, but now gives a stop 0x0000007b error - inaccessible boot device.

-XP CD won't recognize any hard drives.

Steps taken:

-created slipstream with the only drivers I could find(HP was less than helpful and indicated I would have to pay them for them to tell me where to get XP drivers for this laptop)

-attempted repair install, setup still will not detect the hard drives

-ran diagnostics on both drives(separate drives, one is partitioned), no problems reported.

-checked BIOS for bad settings, not enough options to make bad settings possible.


My initial inclination was a bad hard drive or something, but all drives are working fine in Vista. I'd prefer to simply wipe the drives and start from scratch with XP, then Vista, but with no Vista disk I can't do that.


Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

[BOB IROC]

Depending on his needs I have become a big fan of Using MS Virtual PC2007. I use vista as my primary OS and have 3 virtual machines installed that I use for testing and older applications. If you have decent hard drive space and memory it seems to run really nice. The only drawback is that the virtual devices such as video are really low end so it would not be for gaming or really 3D graphic intense apps. But other than that it seems to run really nice.
I mainly use it because I want to use Vista and Office 2007 and our users use XP and Office 2003. That way I just launch my virtual machine and test and make training docs or whatever without the need to reboot. I also have a couple other virtual machines that I use for testing and if I mess it up I just revert to the last saved state and walla I am back like nothing ever happened.
I tried Dual Boot back in the Vista beta and had some difficulty even though I had the OS's installed on completely different hard drives. Since Virtual PC 2007 is Free I thought why not.

[Archangel42069]

Found the solution finally HERE at the very end of the last message from "bill28099". XP started with no problems at all...looks like my customer has been playing with settings he shouldn't be. Of course, if our customers didn't break things, they wouldn't be customers, now would they?

Apparently XP doesn't like native SATA support in this motherboard...just happened to click that since HP=COMPAQ nowadays, they're probably using the same board in each laptop.

Thanks for the suggestions, but he absolutely has to have full functionality.