Replacing the dribe in a Dell Inspiron

[laserblazer]

I'm trying to replace the drive in an Inspiron 1545. The owner wants to upgrade from Vista Home to Windows 7 but initially, I'm trying to install XP to make sure there are no other problems and that's the only install disk I have.

 

The new drive is virgin with one partition, windows setup starts installing and then after a minute or so I get "A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer". I suspect it is the BIOS looking for a recovery partition but I cannot find a way around it.

 

Any ideas please?

 

(that should say drive. I'll leave replacing the dribe until later

[synaesthesia]

tried disabling AHCI in bios?

[laserblazer]

Thanks. I'd just came back to say I'd sorted it by doing just that. As we don't use anything later than XP, I didn't know about that one. Edited January 8, 2012 by laserblazer

[Arthur]

Don't forget to re-enable AHCI again before you install Windows 7. If you don't, read/writing files on the HDD will be slower.