Wanting to Install XP on a Vista Bought Dell...Problems.

Hello there!

After several hours of banging my head against the table, searching the internet's various sites on my problem, I decided to see if any of you fine fellows might be able to lend some aid.

Basically, A friend of mine wants XP on his Dell, He bought it about a year ago with Vista already installed and after all this time he's decided he hates it so much he wants it off, anyway.

I got the machine off him this morning, went ahead to try and do my usual boot from xp cd - reformat - install. However, this doesn't appear to work.

When I do manage to get it to boot from the CD, after it does all its usual steps of writing the certain files etc, It gets to the starting windows and I get a Blue screen. I've read online that this is maybe due to the dell bios settings or something and a precaution by them to not allow you to install windows XP.

I then read, here...http://forums.cnet.com/5208-12546_1...threadID=222695&start=30&tag=forum-w;forums06

that some people went into the Dell Bios and found the RAID settings, switched it off and then were able to install XP onto the machine. I am having no such luck. The machine is a dell system dxp061.

I located RAID in the Drives - SATA Operation, Section of the BIOS and I only had 2 options, "RAID Autodetect / ATA" and "RAID On". No option to turn it off in order to do what others did on that post.

Is it just this system cannot use this function and therefor I cannot put XP on it? Or is there some other method of either turning the RAID off in the bios that I cannot see, or Another methos entirely of putting XP on this machine.

Thanks in advance for checking out my problem!

 

can you switch your hard drive controller back to legacy mode from the bios? its in ata, try to switch it to ahci. thats the only way i know how to install xp on a sata hdd with vista drivers.

 

Well, before even trying to install XP I would check to make sure that all the drivers are available, more and more OEM hardware has no XP drivers. You could try to dual boot but that is quite an involved procedure and needs a Vista DVD to accomplish, if all the XP drivers were available. There are plenty of guides on the 'net for that. Good luck.

Here is one such guide.