Vista on a Vaio. Double trouble, please help.

I recently bought a Sony Vaio and it's being quite stubborn. I want to reformat/repartition to remove Vista and install XP. When I boot into Windows Setup, I get an error message that says:

"Setup could not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer. Make sure any hard disk drives are powered on and properly connected to your computer and that any disk related hardware configuration is correct. This may involve running a manufacturers supplied diagnostic or setup program. Setup cannot continue. To quit setup press F3."

At first I thought maybe Vista controlled the partition from boot, or it was partitioned with something beyond NTFS, this was not the case. I tried resizing the partition to see if extra, unpartitioned space would be recognized. It was not.

How do I get Windows Setup to see the hard drive?

anfini03, I'd bet that your laptop isn't IDE emulating your sata ports/drives. This means that you'll need to put your sata drivers on floppy and load them during Windows CD boot by hitting F6 when prompted to install third party drivers. Or, you could probably find an option in BIOS to set your drives from AHCI or Native SATA or something of that sort to Compatible. Compatible will emulate your sata ports as IDE ports and not require third party drivers. IF this is the case, then Scotteq's suggestion of making a boot disc won't work either without injecting your third party sata drivers into the cd image as well.

But, beware that many laptops that came with Vista don't have XP drivers. If the computer came with Vista, then chances are that you won't find XP compatible drivers for your laptop. Check to find your XP drivers before you do anything, it could save you some trouble.

Arson94

There is a Sony laptop which uses 2 sata drives in a raid array..

Please, Please how many times... We need to know the model of the laptop so atleast we can look up to what we are dealing with..