Vaio AR61M Degrade to XP professional

[Zaffarn]

Hi

I purchased Sony VAio AR61M, I tried to downgrade the OS to WinXP Pro, however it is not recognising the installed harddrive at all during installation, do I require any drivers etc for XP installation.

ps the harddrive capacity is 300GB/ RAM 2GB etc etc etc

Can anyone please help.

[nobscot6]

uummmm......

when does the problem occur and exactly what problems?

does it happen during the actual install? Do you have the sata drivers?

[Zaffarn]

Thanks,

Yep it happens during the intallation process, once the setup loads all the required drivers for the installation, it then check for the harddrives available for intallation this is where its unable to detect any HDs so it quits the installation.

it has 300GB Serial SATA hard drive

[B-FliP]

I'm about to purchase an AR61M and would like to downgrade
to XP as soon as I have it...

I haven't found much info online in order to do this... I will use
an external sound device so HD-audio will be disabled in the BIOS
and I also don't care too much about buttons (altho brightness
would be nice to adjust)...

I would really appreciate some feedback from someone who did
this before so I can start without walking into one wall after the
other...

Could you please inform me which drivers to get? Also please
tell me the issues I might have during or after downgrading
based on your experience...

Thanks in advance!

FliP

[dr.pratik]

xp dont have in built sata driver. solution to your problem is to load sata driver and put it on usb thumb drive and point xp to this driver during setup.after this driver is their,xp will see the sata drive.
or

you can slipstream the sata driver in xp sp2 cd with nlite.you need to download specific driver from sony e support site specific to your vaio model.
google nlite and sata slipstream on xp

[B-FliP]

Yes I read about the SATA issue before, thanks...

About the other drivers, I'll get the video-drivers from laptopvideo2go,
but haven't found too much info on other drivers... Will AR60E XP-drivers
work on the AR61M? And did anyone manage to get the brightness button
working?

[WILLY S]

Here is a similar thread on xp downgrade with sony.

It should explain about the drivers etc.

This may be worth giving a shot also for brightness and function buttons

[B-FliP]

Hi guys, thanks fot the suggestions...

I've downgraded my AR61M to XP and it's fully functional...

I've found instructions on how to downgrade a AR605E on
http://www.driverheaven.net/windows-...iver-help.html and
followed that to install XP and most of the drivers...

Just a note, I created a ghost image of my drive before doing anything
so I will always be able to return to Vista if I would like that... I would
recommend it to anyone who's going to downgrade...

About the downgrade:

I've slipstreamed the Intel Matrix Storage Device Driver into XP and
formatted my drive, then I installed XP...

The drivers and methods for the AR605E will be the same, just a few
things, the soundcard only works if you disable Realtek in the Device
Manager, and to get the FN and eject buttons and Camera Capture
working, after following the 605E instructions, you need to install Vaio
Control Center and Camera Capture utility from the Sony Vaio AR21R
Utility package...

The WIFI will be fully functional after installing the driver for:
Intel PRO 4965AGN... You can get it from the Lenovo or Intel
sites...

Hope it helps!