Can anyone help me do a clean install of XP?

Factual Questions
1

I am trying to do a clean install of XP and downgrade my vista machine. I have a dell Inspiron 530 (service tag 3yp4yf1) that came preloaded with vista ultimate. I have come to understand that with ultimate, I can exercise downgrade rights and go back to XP. I hate vista. This computer is useless to me as is. I have worked with Microsoft to try an fix the problems I have with Vista to no avail, so now the downgrade.

Anyway, I have an XP pro OEM disk that I am using to downgrade. When I boot to it, it starts loading all kinds of drivers and about 2-3 minutes in, it says it is starting windows. At this point I get a blue screen of death. It says:

Well, I don’t have any viruses that Zone Alarm is aware of, but this machine does have a Raid Array (something that I have zero experience with). How do I get past this? There is a point in the setup (while it is loading drivers) where I can tell it to load drivers from a disk (I have all the relevant drivers on a DVD that came from Dell and the website confirms that the drivers are the same for vista and XP - at least as far as I can tell), but when I try to use this disk I get an error that it can’t find a floppy disk drive to load the drivers (well, yeah, I didn’t even get the option of getting the computer with a floppy disk drive). What do I do? How do I wipe these damn hard drives and install XP?

2

Here you go. I’ve followed these instructions multiple times for a clean install of XP. Follow the steps carefully and you’ll be fine.

3

I think the preferred workaround for this problem is to use nLite to build a custom install CD with the drivers already on it.

4

This doesn’t address the missing RAID driver issue.

5

I’m not even sure I am missing the RAID driver, it could be how the drives are partitioned or something funny with Vista. Regardless, I followed the steps put forward on that site and it is crashing on step 2…

Is there a good way that I can wipe the hard drives, repartition them, and then boot to the XP installation disk? Would this work?

6

Does this work with a downgrade?

7

So my array, which BTW is set up in the BIOS, is partitioned into 4 different drives. An unnamed 55 MB section that contains the EISA configureation, 2 primary partitions (recovery 10GB, and OS (216 GB) which has the system, boot, page file, etc…) and a logical drive (Dell backup - 733 GB). All of these partitions (except the EISA) are NTFS. Could any of this be part of the problem?

8

Since the Raid is set up in the bios (Raid1 - mirror), I shouldn’t need the drivers right?

9

Could it be the 4 gig of ram I have and that the windows xp disk does not know what to do with it?

10

You still need the drivers, or once it boots past the initial text based setup program it will blue screen. Follow mbetter’s advice and use nLite to add the drivers to the CD image, then burn a new disk.

11

The alternative involves floppy disks, locating the RAID driver set for that motherboard getting the drivers onto a floppy and pressing f6 as the first phase of the windows install loads.

Along the bottom of the screen you will actually see a little message that says “Press F6 if you need to install a third party SCSI or Raid driver”

you will then be prompted to insert the floppy with raid drivers.

We use usb external floppies in my shop to do this kind of stuff, reloading RAID machines can be a serious headache if you aren’t sure what to do.

12

Not at all, windows just ignores the extra, it will not impair the install.

13

Yep, I get this, and then it freaks out that I do not have a floppy…

Anyway, many thanks all. I will create a boot disk using nlite and come back here and either whine if it does not work or kiss mbetters ass if it does (virtually of course).