So back in November I bought a Gateway GM5420 Desktop . It came with Vista, which I was more than willing to try. It remained a Vista machine, but was barely used until May. DH hated Vista and refused to adapt. I wasn't really all that pleased either. The only thing I really liked about the machine was the ATI Video card, but even then, we don't watch that much TV to keep it around just for that... So we decided to make the machine a dual boot for Vista and XP.
There was one big problem: XP doesn't support SATA drives by default. After searching the Gateway website, it became clear that I wasn't going to find SATA drivers for XP. There were barely any drivers for XP at all. So after some investigation, I found the motherboard information:
Love Valley and Stoughton Motherboard Intel(r) MQ96510J
After some searching around on Intel's site, I found the appropriate drivers. I downloaded the Matrix Storage drivers, which resulted in the following executable:
iata82_enu.exe **
Now, I wanted to Slipstream my installation, so I had to extract the drivers from the executable:
mkdir drivers
iata82_enu.exe -a -p C:\drivers
At first I tried to Slipstream the image using the first tutorial, but things didn't work out for me as expected. I then found out about nLite, which is a nice tool that allows you to add drivers, updates and create a bootable ISO. There's information about it here and here.
So everything worked and XP was installed. I had another problem, the network drivers where not included. This was the easy part, however. The drivers for Intel Pro Network Connections Driver 11.2 are available online.
I still had Vista on the other side, however and needed to make it dual boot. This was no problem, there's a nice tutorial online that can be followed. I just used EasyBCD as mentioned in the article and comments and it worked.
** Note: When I did this, actually the only download available was a Floppy drive file. I then had to use Virtual Floppy Drive 2.1 to extract the drivers
6 comments:
I wish I found your posting a few months ago. I had a lot of trouble getting XP to install on my GM5420 and eventually turned the SATA to IDE emulation (in the BIOS). But I picked up a few drives and wanted to use matrix storage manager to build a small RAID 5 at home. I will follow you instructions with nLite to get matrix storage manager on there.
Thanks!
(Might be boring but I appreciate it.)
I know someone in the same boat. They hate Vista and want to go back to XP.
Question to JL...what was the XP disc you tried? In my experience it's not necessary to install sata drivers if your XP CD has SP2 slipstreamed into it.
The disk was SP2 and did not have the appropriate drivers. Perhaps you meant SP3?
I finally got fed up with the unresponsive Vista and downgraded my gm5420 back to XP. BUT I can't find any sound XP drivers ( Sigmatel HD audio codec). The only solution I found was to get a external usb sound card. Did anybody find a suitable sound driver?
Hey JL, just yesterday My cousin removed Vista from GM5420 and Installed XP SP2 and now the sound card and modem are not working, could you suggest where can I get them?
Thanks for the information. I like all models of gateway. This is a good model but I also like Gateway zx6810. It has an amazing design. It has windows 7 and it performs really well. It offers lot of games and gaming is simply fun. The hard drive is also very good, very satisfying.
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