SATA and IDE are physical hardware connections that connect your hard drive to the motherboard of your computer. To change from IDE to SATA, you literally have to take the hard drive out of the computer and put a new one in, and that's only possible if your motherboard has cables for both IDE and SATA. I don't think I've ever seen a laptop which has connections for both, since there's only room in a laptop for one hard drive. So let me just clarify here, your hard drive type is SATA, <u>not</u> IDE.

First, I'll explain the error you're getting when booting from an XP CD. In order for your motherboard to speak to your hard drive correctly, it has a piece of hardware called a SATA controller. The problem you're getting is that the SATA controller on your motherboard is newer than the XP installation CD, so the drivers for it aren't present on the CD and as a result your motherboard doesn't know how to speak to the hard drive correctly. The page that you linked (<a href="http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows/resolving-setup-did-not-find-any-hard-disk-drives-during-windows-xp-installation/">this one</a>) contains instructions for how to make an XP installation CD that DOES contain the required SATA controller drivers. If you follow that process you will be able to install XP.

As for the Vista error, the thread that you linked to is three years old, and from before Vista was released to market. It would suggest that the Vista disc was burnt either with errors in the burning process or in the image file itself. What version of Vista are you trying to install? Is it a legitimate copy or downloaded? Can you give more information about the laptop? What are its make and model?