yeah so for those of you who following my sis got yet another new peice of electrical equipment, an HP 530 lappy (jokingly called lappy2.0), 4k cheapest i could get one with at least a yr warranty, so good buy by me.
came with vista, downgrade to XP, all went well, HP even have drivers well laid out on site for it, even though it doesn't come with XP as an option.
got a small problem with it though, just freezes at boot now, not even the lil progress bar screen.
a safe mode boot indicates it freezes at the atapi.sys driver load
this uses the intel ICH7 south, so i was wondering if i needed to use F6 at install, as it had detected no hdd when i first tried the XP install - i just disabled native sata and proceeded (however when installing drivers, XP already has them :S)
Now i cant boot and i frustrated, it took me a 4 hrs yesterday to get this thing up and another 2 hrs or so to recover and transfer data from the old lappy to lappy2.0
short of installing with 3rd prty sata drivers (which i will have to integrate into the install as i doh have a floppy) i want to know if it have any work arounds so i can get into the OS and prob undo the install of the sata drivers that windows installed.
btw, i already tried re-enabling native sata - no avail - still shot...
i can get into the system via recovery console and cmd prompt, good a start as any i suppose...
any ideas fellas?