Windows XP installation, no previous version of Windows NT

installationwindows xp

I tried to reinstall Windows XP on my Lenovo S10e netbook, but I got this error:

No previous version of Windows NT can be found on your computer. Setup cannot verify that you qualify to install this upgrade product.
To quit setup, press F3

This notebook has no optical drive, so I am installing XP via an USB pendrive.

Best Answer

Old post. Answering anyways in the hope that nobody will ever need this information since XP is long since dead.

XP and addional drivers:

In order to access a harddrive you need drives for mass storage and drivers for the HDD controller. The first is build into XP. The second might be.

If the driver is already on the XP installation CD then you do not need to do anything. If the driver is not on the standard CD then you have at least two choices:

  1. Create a custom CD with addition drivers (slipstream),
  2. or load the driver during setup. You will be instructed do to this by the installation process with a 'Press F6 to load additional drives'. At that stage you press F6 and insert the floppy with the relevant driver.

XP and AHCI

In the past we used many storage devices. All sorts of SCSI, ESDA, ATA etc etc. For all of these we need drivers. By the time XP reached SP3 the home systems had mostly moved to the ATA interface and there were relative few chipsets. This means almost all drivers for these chipsets could be added to the installation CD and the user got used to things 'just working out of the box'.

This is no longer true with the move to SATA. SATA in it normal AHCI mode is not compatible with IDE/Paralel-ATA. You will need to add drivers. If there ever was a XP SP4 then these would probably be added. However we never got XP SP4. Instead home users moved to Vista, win7 and beyond.

This means that we:

  1. Either need to load a driver. Without driver no harddisk controller and no harddisk behind that controller will be found.
  2. Or we need to set the SATA interface to a slower, less capable mode which is compatible with P-ATA/IDE.

Option 1 is obviously the best, tough you need to come prepared with the right driver on a floppy. And by that time floppy drives had become rare. That means that windows will not find any disk (and no previous NT installation on a disk) when you boot from an XP CD in normal AHCI mode with no added drivers.

This is one possible reason that the OP's installation failed.

An other possible reason is that the OP wiped the disk and used an upgrade CD. The upgrade searches for a previous installation which is no longer there. Obvious fix: Use a regular XP CD.

USB

Lastly there is a booting from USB part. You can boot from an USB pendrive is your firmware (BIOS) supports it. This works if your firmware has some knowledge about how USB and mass storage woks and can emulate it via the old 0x80 interrupt. However after XP initialses it takes over USB and it needs the relevant drivers. Depending on SP and chips used these might not be loaded at that time.

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