How do I install XP on unallocated disk space?

Hello everyone,

This is my first post here, and I'm hoping that I can find the answers I need with what I'm sure is a vastly knowledgeable and extremely cool crowd.

So, here's what I'm trying to achieve. I have a Getac B300 laptop running W7Pro on a single partition. Through a rather bizarre mix of nostalgia and my love for sheer simplicity, I somehow got it into my head that I wanted to run an XP Pro installation on the same machine.

The next station of this (surely flawed ) thought process led me to wonder whether I could do just that with the already existing W7 installation. I got around to shrinking the C: partition, which netted me some 51 gigs of free space that I figured I could use to create a new partition on which to install XPPro. So far, so good.

As you'd expect by now, simply sticking the XP CD into the DVD drive and restarting the machine just won't work: I got the "XP can't see the hard drive" message. So, armed with Google as my friend, I ended up educating myself about how to use nLite to create a copy with integrated iaahci and iastor. Problem is, Having prepared three copies already, after I start the installation sequence and the XP CD installer starts loading files, I'm ending up with the message "the file iastor.sys could not be found," even though I did make sure to include the file that I downloaded from somewhere in the integration process.

So what am I missing here? What am I doing wrong? (I know that the whole concept is "wrong," but there you have it.)

Here are some of the specs of the machine in question:

Getac B300
32-bit W7P SP1
320GB Toshiba MK2555GSX ATA HDD
3GB RAM
ICH8M chipset.

Just let me know what more information you need. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Are you using XP SP3 CD? Find one if not.

Are you following these steps exactly: SATA Drivers - Slipstream into Windows XP CD?

If it still fails after doing these steps, Theog can advise you as he is the expert on this.

You can also consider virtualizing XP which is the modern post-XP era way of visiting that legacy OS. Freeware includes VMWare, Virtual Player, Virtual Box and XP mode if you have Ultimate or Pro.

Yes, the CD I'm attempting to boot from is SP3, and I followed Theog's instructions to the letter. It seems, though, that I'm slip-streaming the wrong drivers: I keep getting the "could not find the iastor.sys" message whenever I attempt to install XP from the slip-streamed CD. I already downloaded the zipped folder that's supposed to contain the chipset driver from Getac's website, but it doesn't contain the iaahci or the iastor files.

If you are using a Genuine MS Windows XP SP3 Pro/Home CD, NO need to slipstream Intel Sata Controller Drivers.

It appears to be necessary for ICH8 chipsets like the one on my B300, but I could be wrong. In any case, it's working brilliantly now :).

What solved it?

Just a matter of knowing exactly what hardware you have and being careful to slipstream the correct drivers into the bootable CD. Once the installer was able to recognize the HDD and the partitions, it was plain sailing from there.