Vista woes

[anshul]

My friend had a very weird problem on his compaq laptop........
He had done something wrong.....(probably he messed up with the system files)....
He was trying to format his PC and install XP........but now......everytime a bootable media goes into the Drive.....it boots initially and then BSOD.....We were not able to format the laptop using XP disk.

Finally we were able to get XP loaded after installing Ubuntu and then formating......

But I am still curious as to what went wrong and what is its solution......?

[Krazy Bluez]

What was the error in the BSOD ? I think you were getting booted in Vista not in XP....

[anshul]

It was some error code in hexadecimal......I dont remember it properly....but
I am quite sure that it was not due to booting in the Vista because....I pressed the key to boot into the CD(XP cd).....
Same problem when loading windows XP live CD....It showed the boot gui of XP and then BSOD....
The lappy was a compaq laptop.

I figured out some thing that such errors occur frequently when loading XP over vista......It has something to do with SATA settings in the BIOS........

Yet in another case of trying to install XP as dual boot on vista.....on a dell inspiron... we had similar problems. And I could not find the SATA autodetect settings in the BIOS. There were 2 modes ATA and ASCI(I think). It was set to ASCI with flash caching enabled. I changed it to ATA.
So I was able to install XP as dual boot and get the choice of selecting the OS using easyBCD....but with the ATA settings on Icouldnt logon to Vista(It gave a BSOD) and when using factory settings XP gave up.....

So one thing is clear to me that it has got something to do with the SATA settings.. but how to resolve it ........I dont know.