[QUOTE=Cosmic Relief]
Just a crazy question… has this computer ever had Windows XP successfully loaded on it? Because unless it had, there would be no reason whatsoever to assume that a PC shipped in 2008 and loaded with Vista would necessarily work with XP, which is 7 years old. Just because Ubuntu and Vista work on it doesn’t mean XP will.
Windows installation bootstraps itself from the CD. Leftovers on the hard drive aren’t going to affect it. The likely situation here is that XP won’t run on this computer.
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[QUOTE=Cosmic Relief]
Windows installation bootstraps itself from the CD. Leftovers on the hard drive aren’t going to affect it. The likely situation here is that XP won’t run on this computer.
[/QUOTE]
Does vista work like XP? I’ve never touched vista but reinstalling a previously preloaded copy of XP often just copies a drive image and doesnt really do an install from scratch. I’ve had computers that came with XP but were erased to install linux and when reinstalling XP, the install program would crash when it couldn’t find a windows partition. A real installer should work through it, but it may not if it’s just copying a drive image.
[QUOTE=gitfiddle]
How do I find out if XP will work on my computer?
[/QUOTE]
The only way it wouldn’t is if there was hardware in it that had only Vista drivers available. The 1420 has XP drivers available for everything.
Here’s a how-to with links to the drivers. Drivers for the Vostro 1400 will also work, they are the same hardware internally.
[QUOTE=yoyodyne]
Your SATA hard drive is probably set to AHCI (or Native) mode in the BIOS. XP doesn’t have the driver built-in for that, you either need to change the SATA mode in the BIOS to ATA/IDE or hit F6 during XP install and use a floppy with the chipset driver.
It has nothing to do with Vista at all.
[/QUOTE]
Too much emphasis in this thread is devoted to the hard drive and not **yoyodyne’s **comment.
Check your BIOS settings. Machines these days are manufactured for Vista and not XP. The XP compatibility only comes into play when you change the BIOS back to a compatibility mode that XP can identify. If you cannot change the BIOS, you need to install the appropriate drivers for XP to work with your machine.
I’ve now used nlite to make a bootdisk, burned the iso, but when I put it in the computer and reboot, it just goes straight into Ubuntu. I have it set to boot to CD first, but at no point does it give me the option to go into the installation, just acts as though there’s no disk in the tray.
Ok. disregard the last post. I hadn’t actually made a bootdisk…
However, now, I have. I’ve made three. Doing EXACTLY what those websites are saying, and I’m still getting the exact same error I got with the original disk!