Dell problems

L

Legit^

Poster Extraordinaire
Joined
Feb 21, 2008
Messages
3,491
OK so I had a customer drop off a comp to fix, it's a Dell XPS 600. When I try to install a fresh copy of windows XP I get an error message saying it doesn't detect a HDD. I read that quite a few people have gotten this problem. All of the hardware is good. Any help?

Thanks
 
Sounds like you don't have the drivers for the controller on the XP disc. Go to support.dell.com, download the controller drivers, put them on a floppy and load the optional driver during the initial part of setup (F6 on the first blue screen). You could optionally slipstream the drivers into the XP disc but if you don't know what you're doing then it's more of a pain than it's worth.

One last ditch effort if you don't have a floppy drive is to try to set the SATA port into legacy mode, which XP sometimes has generic drivers for this emulated controller mode. The BIOS may not support it though.
 
Also to avoid having to use a floppy disk to stream the sata/raid drivers you can slipstream them to disk so they are loaded during install the program to do it is called nlite.
 
Yep, the lack of controller drivers is pretty much the answer to this one.

Just shows you how OLD Windows XP actually is.
 
Yep, Dell actually fixed that with the XP SP2 discs. The problem with this particular model as well as the rest of dell machines sold between sept 04 till december 06 had what was called MRI, Media Reduction Initiative... which meant that there was a restore partition on the primary boot drive. With this, they had eleviated the need of loading those drivers. What was left if the drive was ruined was a call to dell tech support for install media, shipping time and then a few hours reinstalling and updating the OS.

When Vista shipped, things went straight to hell at first then cleaned up nicely.

So, what was dropped in your lap was a system that was setup with a factory installed work around for the lack of integrated sata drivers in XP.

HP on the other hand, did it right. They built into their system bios, the ability to "Disable SATA Native Mode" which in turn runs the SATA controller interface in a sudo IDE mode which can be re-enabled after the OS is installed.
 
Can I just hook up that HDD to my PC and format it? Would that help in any way?
 
KillZone said:
Can I just hook up that HDD to my PC and format it? Would that help in any way?
Click to expand...

not likley


all you need to do is find the driver you need and slipstream it into a XP disc.

there is a the hard way of doing this if you google it but the easiest way is just find the driver you need and get the installer from nliteos.com and use that to make a new XP disc that includes the driver.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Saf
  • Sticky
Official eGO Minecraft Player Guide
Replies
1
Views
1K
Saf
Saf

Latest posts

Back
Top