Installing Windows XP on Acer Aspire 4530

We recently bought a Acer aspire 4530 without any pre-installed OS. On top of linux, we decided to go for Windows XP as it is fairly stable and less resource hungry compared to Vista. When we tried to install Windows XP, we consistently encountered a failure with the fatal blue screen. Before the blue screen, the installation complains that it couldnt find disk drives. After googling around a bit, I realized that this is a standard problem. The main reason is that the Windows XP installation CD does not have native support for SATA hard disks with AHCI interface. So, the same problem can happen on any machine which has SATA hard disk. The following is the solution for the above problem...

There are two options.
1. Simplest method: Changing the BIOS setting
2. Advanced method: Adding SATA drivers to Windows XP installation CD.

Option 1:
In case of Acer, the BIOS settings allow you to change the SATA mode. It can be found in the "Main" section. By default it will be in AHCI mode. Change it to IDE mode. This makes your SATA disk behave like an IDE disk. Once you change to IDE mode, you are ready to go ahead with the installation of Windows XP as usual. This is the simplest solution.

There are couple of reasons why you might not prefer this solution over the next one. First, your BIOS settings might not allow you to change the SATA mode. In that case, you do not have an alternative other than to go for the next option. Secondly, you will not reap the full benefit of your SATA harddrive. SATA's AHCI interface gives better throughput compared to IDE in most of the situations. If you are more interested in this topic search for "Native Comamnd Queuing(NCQ)". This is a very nice article comparing AHCI vs IDE.

There is a way to change the mode to AHCI after installing the XP in IDE mode. I personally did not try this method but this article explains how to do this on machines with intel chipsets. Note that this method should not be followed if your chipset is AMD. I will update this article If I find a way to do this for AMD platforms.

Option 2:
This is a little complicated option in the sense that you have to create a new XP installation CD with SATA AHCI drivers included in it. This technique is called "Slipstreaming". Follow the "Internet and CD burner method" section in this article.