Downgrading to XP Home from Vista

Ok guys, I have a little project to work on in my spare time this week. Someone in my family has Vista on their HP Pavillion DV2000 laptop and they seriously do not like it, and have had problems with it, and they aren't overly "techy" so those little problems are a major nuisance for them. Anyways, they asked if I could install XP on it for them as they (and I) like it much better. I have heard that it is a bit of a pain in the rump to downgrade, and I soon found that out to be true. :/ I've read up on it online a little bit, but I thought that I would post here and ask for some insight from any of you that have actually done this before yourselves. XD

Note: The apparent problem is that I need to disable the Sata driver in the BIOS to get the XP CD to install (aka no more "no harddrive found error on setup") However the crappy little Bios on this laptop doesn't even give me that option... so I guess I need to make an XP disc with Sata drivers integrated into it so that I can actually install XP over Vista. I hope that I've made some sense. lol

Personal experience with this would be greatly appreciated as well as any links to software that would assist in this process.

Thanks in advance.

You shouldn't need any SATA drivers. It's only when you plan to run a RAID array that drivers come into it. I've installed XP on several systems (desktops) with SATA drives and had no problems. (SP2 though, maybe SP1 or earlier lacks SATA support.)

I would suggest however, that you don't try to simply install XP over Vista as an "upgrade" (downgrade). Instead, try to get all the XP drivers you'd need from the laptop maker's website, and start with a fresh install. Backup any files you want to keep to a USB external drive, first.

Laptop-wise - I recently tried to downgrade a Sony laptop to XP, but the only sound drivers I could find would only install in Vista, so it ended up staying Vista. The sound card drivers were the only problem, though - I had no problems related to the SATA drive in it.

P.s. If you disable the SATA driver in the BIOS, how's XP supposed to find the hard drive? I suspect you are referring to disabling the RAID function (which probably doesn't exist on the laptop.)

EDIT - I just checked the HP website. It looks as though all the drivers are available for XP. Download the appropriate drivers (you may need to find out exactly what equipment is in your particular variation of DV2000), and put them on a USB Flash RAM or external hard drive (along with those backed up files) before you format the drive.

EDIT#2 - Does the HP come with a set of "Recovery Disks" or does it have separate OS and driver disks? If it has a separate driver/software CD, the proper XP drivers may be already on it (along with the Vista versions).

Do exactly as Quaker said, lol. It's the easiest solution. Wipe the old and install the new.

That's the least painless way.

I actually downgraded my dv2000 about a month ago. The dv2000 does use a SATA HD, which means you'll need to slipstream an XP install disk to include SATA drivers like you said. Otherwise when you boot up the install disk, it won't detect the HD.

All the dv2000's drivers can be found for XP. They're scattered across random websites, but they are available. Just slipstream an installation CD, boot it up, wipe off the old partitions, and start installing.

Words of advice: When installing the drivers, reboot after EVERY single driver. You'll run into weird problems if you don't. Also, the built in webcam will probably break. I read something about how the webcam's driver is built into the hardware, and changing drivers breaks the webcam. Mine stopped working about a week after I downgraded.

PS: dv2000's suck. The battery latch snapped off first time trying to use it. The fan's wear out quick. The graphics card died after a year and a half of use (died last week actually). Didn't get the extended warranty. Now it's in parts on my floor.

Yeah I agree that HP sucks in general - but it's not my laptop so... Anyways, I ended up using nlite to create/slipstream a new XP disc with the drivers (which I found from HP) so that the poor old lappy would recognize the hard drive and continue with the setup after booting from the cd. It's currently going through the XP installation process, so it looks good right now - I'll edit this when it's actually completely installed. :s

well it is finally up and running - installing xp was the easy part, finding all the &*%&^$%&^$% drivers for this hp product was a crapfest. Oh well, half a day gone by messing with it, but it now scoots along nicely with XP and that is more than worth it. XD