Martin Wu from LiteOn totally found the drivers for the wireless card, so the card is a go. Just need the display utility and the ethernet driver, and we're all set.
UPDATE: After spending all week hunting down drivers, making countless slipstreamed windows installers, breaking google in half, crawling forums like a madman, I stumble across a three page forum thread dedicated to getting rid of Vista and installing xp for this EXACT MODEL OF COMPUTER. LINKED IN THE FORUM POST IS A PAGE WITH EVERY SINGLE XP DRIVER FOR EVERY PIECE OF HARDWARE IMAGINABLE FOR THIS EXACT LAPTOP.
*bangs head into wall*
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I got xp pro to install using some slipstreamed drivers (thank god for driverpacks.net)
Ok, so XP Pro installed fine, but a good bit of hardware isn't working. In the Device Manager, I have 7 devices in the "Other Devices" (aka Not Working) category:
If you go here you can see the drivers and components in the laptop. Here are some issues/thoughts I have on fixing the situation: 1)Go back to DriverPacks (see previous post), and include all of the driverpacks possible, and hope that they will install themselves if I reinstall XP. 2)The wireless driver on the gateway website (link provided) says vista only. Uh-oh. 3)The wireless card (according to gateway) was manufactured by a company called LiteOn, but I couldn't find any drivers on their website (I did send them an email though). 4)The network card may be shot (he says it hasn't worked since his power went out a few weeks ago). I'm thinking number one may do the trick..but I've learned a lot about installing XP here the past few days, so I'm thinking someone has a solution with a greater chance of working.. (Taken from my post at the MSFN) |
My friend bought a laptop (Gateway MX8738). He quickly found out that he wasn't a fan of Vista, so I said I would install XP Pro on it for him. I recently did something similar to this on a windows 98 computer for a relative, where I put in new parts (hard drive, ram, WLAN card), and installed windows xp pro perfectly fine.
So it looked like a relatively easy task. I used DBAN/Nuke to wipe the hard drive, then I popped in the xp pro disc. Then I got an error. I googled around and found out I needed a SATA driver. Unfortunately, these have to be installed via floppy. The laptop doesn't have a floppy drive, so I slipstreamed the driver using nLite. I made a disc, and started to install. I got past the original error until I got another error telling me my driver was corrupted. (iaStor.sys)
Then I found that I might have needed to change some drive configurations in the Bios (version 72.15). I've looked through it for a good half an hour and cannot find anything to do with the hard drive other than boot order.
So the question is, am I screwed?
