XP on Dell Vostro 1500

[aliv25]

Im trying to install XP service pack 2 ona Dell Vostro 1500, which came with Vista Basic. I ran into a problem installing xp, it brought me to an error message saying it could not detect any hard drives when i tried to boot it after pressing continue. Any ideas???

[dhicks]

> Im trying to install XP service pack 2 ona Dell Vostro 1500

We bought Vostro 200s over the summer - similar machines, I imagine. Ours have no IDE harddrive interface, only SATA, so even the CRROM is SATA. I initially had a problem booting SystemRescueCD on them. I downloaded the latest version (0.4 Beta 8), which works well.

Our machines come with an on-board RAID controller, one of those ones that needs drivers to work. This controller can be set to see the harddrives in "RAID mode" or otherwise. Trying seeing what the BIOS setting is, and switching it to the other mode. Failing that, there should be a Windows XP RAID driver on Dell's website. You'll need to copy it to a floppy drive (and, probably, hook up a floppy drive to your machine first) so that the Windows XP installer can read it (the "Press a key now if you want to install a third-party RAID controller..." message you get right at the start of the install process).

Re-reading your original post, I'm not quite sure if you mean Windows XP got past the whole install-on-HDD, install-software, remove-CD-and-reboot and /then/ failed. If so, and if it's any help, when I installed XP on our machines I wiped the whole harddrive - Dell restore partition and everything. Hmm. This could probably still be fixed with a RAID/SATA disk driver.

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David Hicks