Going from Windows Vista to XP

I have an HP DV4 laptop, trying to load windows XP operating system. The current operating system is Vista. I inserted a clean copy of windows XL and I get the following error: "unable to find ntldr"

 

Hi, Welcome to MG!

When you installed XP how many partition choices were there? (I'm thinking that there might have been a small System Reserved partition that is messing up the boot process.)

I'm not talking about the Factory Restore partition that many laptops have of about 8-10gb but a very small boot partition around 100mb.

 

Although I hope this isn't the case on your PC, I have run into issues on both HP and Lenovo PCs (pre-loaded with Vista Premium or Win 7 Premium) where the BIOS would not allow XP to load or run properly.

In both cases, the systems either went into an endless rebooting cycle or gave error messages when attempting to boot with XP installed on the primary hard drive. On the HP, their tech support was both evasive and useless. On the Lenovo (which was brand new), I told my customer to cut his losses and return the unit for one that specifically shipped with a Windows Professional version that included the XP downgrade media.

 

Hi Everygeek,
I believe I may be having the same problem with an Acer Aspire M5640. But after I load the XP disk I get the Blue screen of death and everything stops. I also thought of the beginning boot partition and couldn't get the drive to Low level format - I found out that I had a SATA Drive, I looked into how to format the drive, found a nice L. L. Formater by the name GPARTED, formated the drive down to blank and still couldn't load XP. I think it is the way the BIOS is written, but I have no way to tell. If I could read the program in the BIOS I would be able to see if my hunch is right, but where do You start to find that kind of info ??. I HATE vista ! It's the biggest piece of Crapware M.S. ever built. And from what I see of my sons computer - 7 is NO BETTER !!
I have been jumping back and forth from linux back to vista and then Linux, because I have no understanding at all of the Linux Commands, I was brought up on DOS, back when 64 KB was a Huge amount of memory. I may even have some 180 KB, 5 1/4 " disks down in the basemant. I know I have 20 -30 , 8 " 125 KB IBM disks down there.
If any body figures out why the newer computers won't boot XP I wish that they would be kind enough to let me know what the culperate is. I have a cloned Nvidia MoBo. in this acer and I seen a BIOS on their site if it is the BIOS maybe I'll try useing that one. It's risky but worth a shot if I can get XP back on this mech.
Thank You for reading my post.
Cabie65

 

What I'm trying to do is set-up a dual boot using Vista and XP, with my HP DV4 laptop.