Sadly most often this is a boot sector error. They can be fixed most of the time, it is basically a corrupted sector, which hopefully can be restored.

A program called DiskPatch may just do the trick.

Your hard drive is SATA, and this is the only place you may need extra drivers. If your motherboard came with a cd they should be on there, or you can check the Toshiba website. The easiest way to find out is to put the windows XP cd in your drive and restart your computer. If the installed finds your hard drive, format windows and re-install you are good to go. If it does not, there is an option to load 3rd party drivers while booting, and this is where you would use the other drivers from a cd.

To protect any data on your drive, try the following tutorial:
http://www.syschat.com/clean-install...-data-564.html

windows is difficult to run on a usb device, often there is no registry. Linux is a special breed of OS which should not be compared to Windows.

Thanks William for your quick reply. Yes, it is a SATA drive that came with my toshiba laptop p105-9339. i'll try using fdisk to see if it'll work.

Thanks.

Creating dual boot
 

Thank you - although I'm a bit frightened to do this on my brand new computer, I have some embroidery machine digitizing software that cost $1500 a few years ago. It's not Vista compatible and won't be without a $400 upgrade kit.

I am going to have to create this dual boot - wish me luck!! - Susanna

Issue with Vista
 

I'm trying to shrink my hard drive to create another partition to install XP on, but when I go into disk management, and click shrink, I get a message that shows only 76MB availalbe for another partition. I still have nearly 30GB free on my hard drive, and only need 8-10GB for what I want to use XP for.

Thanks for any help.

Similar Problem
 

I also had the error of windows xp not recognizing my partition with a sata drive. I tried using both a formatted and unformatting partition as well as creating the partition using the vista program and creating it through the dos prompt as well with no luck. The odd thing to me is that xp thinks that my drive is only 131gb (someone else mentioned this as well) when it is actually 300. My system is custom built with an asus P5N-sli motherboard.

Well I finally got so frustrated that I just wiped my hd and installed xp first. I am still in the process of updating xp fully before I install vista and had a question concerning software and games. Say I install office while using the vista partition but I want to use office as well when using the xp one. Are there any rules you must follow? I know some programs can be copied from one computer to another and run fine without any formal installation, while others will fail unless they went through the installation process. I would like to only have to have 1 installation of office if possible installed on either a separate partion or drive. I appreciate any help with this matter.

for the most part it will not work unless you install on both partitions. If the registry is involved (as with all games) it should not work. There are a few exceptions if you go back a few years, but very few.

Sorry you will have to install the software on both OS.



I will answer the rest of the questions in about 12 hours... for now I must go to work.

found the problem
 

I have found the problem and solution to my problem. My XP wasn't able to read partition that I've newly created. The reason is that XP can't read big hdd. Then I tried XP SP-2, it was able to see my partition. Currently, I've got my XP installed on the 2nd partition and I'm searching for drivers from my toshiba laptop. Just want to spread my finding and share the solution.:icon_wink:

right!! The easy solution, I always forget that some people have XP without SP2.

I will ammend this problem with another tutorial, if I find time, i will do it this weekend. Showing paths to solve the most common issues.