First of all, why install a 10-year-old system? I miss a certain multiplayer game that is played over the network via IPX. Now on to my journey before I managed to integrate the SATA drivers. I spent about 2 hours on a program called Virtual Floppy Driver (VFD) 👻 This link is deader than Flash Player. – I tried everything imaginable with it, I tried both of its versions, but everything failed, or rather, nothing worked.
The SATA drivers for HP must have been designed by some smart guy who assumed that everyone who buys a laptop would have another PC with a floppy drive and a working floppy disk at home, because not a single HP laptop had a built-in floppy drive. I even downloaded SATA drivers from the internet that were supposed to work on most motherboards and controllers – but for me they unfortunately didn’t work..
Today, however, I got hold of the drivers. I extracted the file sp32478.exe with 7zip, then again with 7zip I extracted the file F6flpy32.exe – the only one from sp32478.exe – and I got the file temp.IMA. Since VFD had associated itself with .ima files, I thought I would manage it somehow with it. Well, I didn’t. When I chose a floppy size smaller than the file, it told me “The file size does not match the selected media size“, and when I chose a larger floppy instead, it said “The file is too small for the selected media type.”
In version 1.01 it reported “Failed to mount the Virtual FD image "%s". Invalid image file size.” for both the larger and the smaller file. As I already wrote, I struggled with it for 2 hours until today I figured out how to beat it! All it took was to open the temp.ima file in UltraISO, and the files I got that way I integrated into the XP installer using NLite. Well, I haven’t tried booting it yet, but it should work :). And actually, why waste time, I’m going to try it right now :).