Sean’s note: Early versions of XP didn’t understand what a Serial ATA hard drive is, and most new computers use Serial ATA for the hard drive connector…while some of these new computers have motherboards that will treat the SATA drive as if it was the old-school IDE hard drive, there are a number with drives that just won’t be able to see that hard drive. In those cases you need to click F6 at the point during the Windows XP setup process where it asks if you have any special drivers to install. Unfortunately, for this to work you also need to have a floppy drive with that SATA driver on it…and a new notebook likely won’t have that, either. Ouch.

Before going through the hassle of trying to locate an external USB floppy drive, you might want to boot into your notebook’s BIOS to check out the drive configuration, as there were some motherboards that actually gave you the option to make your SATA drive appear as if it was an IDE drive. If you have that option in your BIOS, you might be able to work around this issue.

You might also be able to get around this issue by finding a copy of Windows XP that has already been pre-patched with Service Pack 2. That version of the OS solved a lot of little problems and applied a bunch of updates to avoid legacy problems. But it might not be cheap to get your hands on it….despite Vista theoretically rendering XP obsolete, copies of XP are still going for $100 on eBay.