I was advised to join this thread for assistance, since that's what I'm trying to achieve and I am a noobie in this area. I can change hardware and do installations, but not afraid to dwell in new areas.
System is a HP Pavilion P6310f Win 7 64bit, mobo M2N78-LA, Athalon II x4 630, GeForce 8600GT PCIe card, 6gb ram, 1tb hd and I believe the SATA controller is Nvidia Nforce MCP78S (GeForce 8200) AHCI.
My quest: Dual boot with 7 and XP.
Reading through
Blink's tutorial, my only option is to slipstream the sata
drivers. I have yet to partition the existing drive to install XP, because reading through the tutorial, it suggests to download the drivers from the manufacturer's site. For my unit, HP lists Windows 7 32, Windows 7 64, Vista and Vista 64. When I hover the cursor over to "...OS not listed.." I get "
If your operating system is not listed, HP does not have software or downloads available for this product in that operating system."
Then I tried searching for the mobo and I could not find what I need. I was also wondering, should I also have drivers for the rest of the hardware installed in the machine besides the SATA drive? Sometimes I feel this stuff is over my head. But the tutorials like this with screen shots are awesome and motivating.
I do not have the HP install cd, but I made the recovery dvd's (3) shortly after I got the machine. I also have a new, still in the wrapper, retail copy of XP Pro SP2.
Request: Help finding any drivers to complete this dual boot. Thanks.