Success...so far...Question, tale of woe, warning!

First post! Great site, great tutorial, thank you much!

I picked my screen name because, despite quite a bit of experience (programming real-time at chip level in hex, coding in MATLAB, FORTRAN, LISP, build my own computers, etc) it seems I'm getting stale and every time I try something I end up in a mess!

I bought a box for the boss when his crashed during an office move. I was tied up and needed something quick, so just went to the local big box and picked up a machine with Vista Home Premium on it, intending to "downgrade" to XP as this was OK with Micro$oft. Long story short, ended up with Vista Ultimate and an unformated partition for XP so:

Thanks #1 for including the fact that this partition must be formatted BEFORE you start the XP setup. Another site left that little detail out, which caused much frustration!

Thanks #2 for having the QA right below so I could find that I had to get into the BIOS & disable SATA native mode for XP to see the formatted partition. That solved the "Your computer has been stopped..." BSOD that I was getting.

Problem #1 - now install was going, but as install proceeded (and I was typing this) something locked up, so I'm now using XP cd's recovery console to reformat the partition. Note too, that although I'd used Vista's disk manager to format the partition and designate the drive letter as "D:", XP Setup detected it as "H:" (Volume name was the one I'd given it).

Question #1: (Background) We'd always, prior to XP, used two physical drives or at least two partitions in our machines, with Windows and the programs on C: and all our docs/data on D: Then with XP we were stuck with the "Documents and Settings" folder for the user hives even if we pointed the "My Documents" folder to the D: drive. I eventually found a way to move the user hives to D: (not for the faint of heart, mind you!), but it's a lot easier to just say where you want it on install. (Q) But how does one run winnt.exe or win32.exe in unattended mode, with an Unattended.txt file having the desired drive:\directory entry, when you're installing from the CD? Off-topic to be sure, but whilst I'm here...

Helpful Hint: After I raised holy cain, my manufacturer responded with a complete list of where I could get XP drivers for my machine. I'm with the soul who posted that the computer manufacturer should support you using any operating system you fiddly well please, just because they pre-install an operating system shouldn't lock you into that forever, at the very least among teh Windows flavors. Supposedly, the major manufacturers are supporting XP downgrades, as they bloody well ought to. But you may have to push pretty hard.

Best to all,

DangerousTom