I saw a thread somewhere in the net about downgrading from vista to xp. It never showed anything about the problem I am experiencing. I erased the two partitions, the recovery one and the other one.

I tried to install xp. My bios recognizes the hard drive but the xp cd doesnt seems to find the hard drive. I have checked and some people are looking for hard drive controller drivers in order to install windows xp.

In my case, right now I dont want to know anything more about windows xp. I have my recovery cds but when i run them they still cant find the hard drive and they ask me for hard drive drivers.

I also took the hard drive off my notebook and I tryed to install windows xp in another computer in my hard drive. So, what I did was to just install the files prior to the windows xp set up.

what can I do?

How can i restore it back to as it was first set up

my laptop is a sony vaio VGN-FZ140E by the way

If you have the recovery cds, you must use those to restore the system. Since you destroyed the recovery partition, there is no other method to restore the system except by using the recovery cds.

Note: Most new pc's use SATA hard drives requiring SATA hard disk controller drivers (which are not on a Windows XP installation disk). Microsoft is only putting SATA controlller drivers on the newer Vista OS installation disks.