XP Install Error
For any of you who have been tasked with supporting Windows XP, I thought I’d share my experience installing XP on some new hardware. We got some Dell Vostro 220s for a great price ($420, Core 2 Duo 2.6 GHz, 2GB RAM, 250GB HD, 20″ monitors) which came with Vista Home Basic, which as everyone by now knows is basically worthless, especially in an office environment. We run XP on our network and so I went to install XP on these computers.
I used an Ubuntu 8.10 live cd to repartition the hard drive. It was formatted in three partitions, one fat16, one ntfs recovery partition, and the ntfs partition that held Vista. I reformatted into one ntfs partition. When I went to boot from the XP install CD, I got the BSOD and stop error 0×0000007B. I googled the error and found it means it can’t find the boot device. I tried a few things to no avail until I stumbled onto the answer in the BIOS.
There was a SATA mode setting that was set to AHCI. Switching it to ATA fixed it. I don’t completely understand what happened or why. But I figured that might be helpful to someone searching for an answer to this problem.
Tagged as Install errors, Windows XP + Categorized as Tech
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I’ve had a similar experience trying to reinstall XP on one of our family’s computers. Apparently AHCI is a method of accessing SATA drives that XP does not support natively (the other more friendly mode is a form of RAID, I believe). I had to download drivers from Dell’s support site onto a floppy and use that floppy with the “install additional drivers” option under XP’s setup. If (as I understand) you could not even boot from the CD-ROM though, that is strange… It is interesting however to see how much hardware has progressed since XP was first released.
I had a similar problem with my computer when I tried to reinstall XP. I think it might have been the same problem. Since my computer (the only one I have) was the one receiving the reinstall, I couldn’t Google Jack Squat. That is why I installed Ubuntu. No problem with that.
Peter,
Yeah, I think I found a driver for AHCI for these computers. Is it worth it to install the driver and switch it back? Also, when I say it wouldn’t boot, it would boot to the CD, start loading files and then go to start Windows to begin installation and I’d get the BSOD with the error.
Jeremy,
Are you using the Intrepid Ibex, the latest Ubuntu (8.10 I think)? Do you use wireless networking at all on it? I was having trouble with WPA security with Hardy Heron, so I’m curious to know if they fixed that.
No, you should be fine just using the ATA mode. AHCI only adds the ability to hotplug drives (like usb does) and provides a slight boost in read/write performance.
This worked great to bypass the stop error 0×0000007B I also got when I opened my vostro 220s that had vista home preinstalled on it. Thank you very much for the suggestion. It worked great. I love formatting vista machines!
I’m glad I was able to help. I was setting up a Dell Studio Hybrid yesterday and got the same problem. I had to switch it from AHCI to IDE to get it to work. Don’t you just love the fact that Dell offers an older operating system (XP) as a Bonus Upgrade for $100? Makes you kind of feel sorry for Vista.