Installing XP in Dell by this method..?

Ive got vista preinstalled in my Dell Inspiron, and for some SATA driver reasons which I dont get, I cant install XP there. So I was thinkin, what if I connected my Dell harddisk to my desktop PC, install XP from there, and modify the boot.ini for the laptop? would that work? coz i need to be sure it does before i kill vista
Answer #1
Well first thing you must make sure is that you have all your Windows XP drivers, ethernet, wireless, touch pad, graphics card, etc. Then you go to BIOS and switch it to IDE or just get proper SATA drivers for your computer.
But if you do not have the drivers for XP i do not recommend you reformat for it will be a mess. Best thing to do in that case is get VirtualBox and install Windows XP in it. Since you have Vista i assume you have 2GBs of RAM at least so running a virtual machine should be easy for you.
As for your main question, it might not work because Windows will have other hardware drivers installed but who knows i never tried such thing. It could work.
Answer #2
thx man. the XP drivers for dell hardware are available online though. lemme try the VirtualBox thing first
Answer #3
Use nLite to integrate drivers to a XP install. If you need more help PM
Answer #4
go into your bios and look for the hard drive controler and set it to IDE mode from AHCI or RAID
or
grab a copy of XP with the AHCI/SATA drivers already integrated most recent SP3 version have themt, but not all