Wanna Get Vista RC1 on Toshiba M400?
It's been a hard time installing Windows Vista RC1 on a Toshiba M400 but I finally succeeded in doing it. You have to be careful that what was running smoothly with earlier builds will not with the RC1 - Drivers that do not comply with quality tests have just been removed - which is a good thing on one hand - no more blocking or crashes but on the other hand, prevents you from installing this cool OS on your cool Laptop ;-)
Indeed, first of all, you will find out that when booting your M400 from the Vista DVD, the setup program will not find your hard disk(s) - why? - because the M400 has a SATA-RAID controller that doesn't have a "Vista Ready" driver at YET! Then, what you have to do is to pick-up the one from the Toshiba Support site which is certified for Windows XP.
The driver I was using is posted at the Toshiba WebSite here.
Once you have downloaded the driver, unzip it to an USB Memory stick and keep it ready for the disk management panel during setup. Use your Vista DVD to boot from and just stick the USB memory stick into any left hand USB port on your M400 - you may try both ports until it is recognized by the setup - and then, point to the memory stick when setup program ask you to load an external driver.
Once Vista has load the driver, you should see the disk and you should be ready to moving forward in the installation process. There are maybe two things that you don't want to do using the Windows XP driver for this device:
- Don't do any RAID1 or RAID0 configuration
- Don't use the BitLocker functionnality
for this, you should wait for an Official Vista Ready driver from Toshiba.
Bottom line, it worked for me but do not take this as an Official Microsoft solution - think about it as a temporary solution ;-)
[PS: I changed the Original article because of a formatting problem and some other things ...]
