How to insert SATA drivers to your XP CD

If you purchase a latest laptop their is a big possibility that you can't install windows XP on them. The XP setup program doesn't recognize the hard drive on the laptop. Some people may think why I need to install XP on my new laptop. Because Microsoft released two of their operating systems after windows XP. But still lot of people preferred to have windows XP on their computers. Let's go to our problem once again. The reason for this is Windows XP CD doesn't contain the SATA drivers for your laptops hard drive. There is a option on windows setup that you can load these drivers but unfortunately it requires floppy disks. No one uses them any more so we have to find an other way to solve this problem.

nLite is an amazing software that lets you tweak and hack your XP CD to the core with an extremely easy to use user interface. You can download it from here.

To start creating your custom XP CD you need to download the necessary SATA drivers from the manufactures website. It will depend on what brand of a laptop you have. Download the SATA drivers to your computer.

Launch nLite after inserting Windows XP CD into the drive. Choose to make an image of Windows XP in a directory of your choice. Click next and proceed to skip import or load previous settings step by clicking next and proceed to next step.



On the next page, you will find a “Drivers” tab. Click on it and also check the bootable ISO option and then click on next. Click on the button at the bottom to insert the driver. Give the location to the folder where you extracted the SATA driver. You will find a couple of inf files, select any one of them. Now select the all the driver files. That is it, click Next.



You will now be asked for confirmation, select yes and let nLite integrate the driver and create a bootable image. Burn it on a CD by just hitting the Burn button at the bottom and you will be ready to install Windows XP on your laptop.



Read more about Customize Windows Installation with nLite from here.

Read more about how to use a floppy disk to load SATA drivers from here.