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Clean Install can be done on XPS400/9150!
Here you go. I have been looking at these forums for a while now and tried all of the methods to get my system to work from a clean install with no luck. I would always get that BSOD stop error right before the first run of XP. I finally got it running! and boy is it fast!
Go to
http://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html for a program called nLite. This program is free and allows you to slipstream service packs into a cd and slipstream driver installs and more tweaks before install.
Then go to
http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/ and follow all of the guides there. It was very easy to do. I only wish I found all of the hotfixes for my system, but I only had to get 12 after install.
According to that site when you do the F6 method of installing SATA drivers and RAID drivers XP ends up still using the wrong ones. You have to slipstream the Drivers into the xp disk for it to work. When using Nlite you can slipstream all of your extra drivers for install without modifiying any files. Nlite does it all! I'm so glad I found these two places.
The latest build of nlite is RC6 and hasnt failed me yet. They also have a guide to using Nlite on their homepage.
I hope this helps atleast one other person. Should work for any special driver installs your having trouble with.
- It does need .NET 2.0, but there is no need to install after the clean install. Its just needed to run nLite. You'll never have to see .NET 2.0 ever again. It is well worth the effort. My windows has never started so quick. not bloated like it was before.
qwerty1357
74 Posts
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Posted February 22nd, 2006 17:00
Well I gave it a go; and this nLite tool is really quite useful, you can even remove things you don't like from the install so you never see them (like Messenger...).
I had a problem with the CD install stopping at the partitioning stage and waiting for input. My USB keyboard is unable to provide any input at that stage, but a little tweaking of the winnt.sif file PLUS realising that the installer didn't like the idea of installing to free disk space but wanted a formatted partition helped.
Restoring the system partition from an image followed by a bootup from the new CD showed that Windows was then installed over the top of the existing system.
However that left me with a messy install which was a mixture of the old system and the new install. I couldn't see that disentangling that would be either easy or error free, so back to the old system (thank goodness for image restoration).
What I really need is a way of wiping the system partition before running the install disk. Any thoughts as to a suitable tool?
Another irritation by the way is that System Activation was, er, activated as part of the re-install. I thought OEM versions of WindowsXP didn't require activation?
Q.- When I did a clean install I used nLite to slipstream a disk mainly for the raid/ahci drivers. The original O/S image came from Dell by the way.I put the newly created disk in the drive, rebooted, and changed the bios to see the cd first. I didnt press F6 I let the windows setup continue and said install a new copy of windows. I selected the main partition which was 149gb for me. I deleted the partition and then told windows to install on the selected space which didnt have a partition. Windows then setup while installing my Pro100 network card, Nvidia drivers, Raid drivers and Modem drivers before I even got to the desktop. Not to mention more than half of my hotfixes were already installed as well.Hope this helps. It really was easy. After I was done I restored the MBR from dell just in case I need to restore back to the original system in the future using DSRFIX.
Highlander_821
31 Posts
305
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Posted March 10th, 2006 13:00
Thanks all for the info in this thread. I had had to settle for the Raid/ATA Bios change in order to install XP on my Dim9100, resulting in slower HD performance in a couple of programs I use.
Since getting NLite and slipstreaming the RAID/AHCI drivers into my installation, It was easy to finally get this machine running the way it is supposed to, with full support for NCQ, faster drive performance.
Thanks again!deagletime
9 Posts
305
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Posted March 13th, 2006 20:00
gentlemen, thank you all for the great advice... now i do have a question.. because of the sata drive in my dell 9100, i must use this nLite program to make a bootable iso Xp installation disk with sata drivers intergrated within it. otherwise, i would get the notorious blue screen telling me that there are no hard drives found... correct so far?now that I have installed nlite on another computer, I am creating that bootable iso disk... my question is this.. do i need to install with it any additional sata drivers from another website? or does it have nlite have it integrated in it already ? if i do need to add those drivers to the iso disk, where does one find these particular drivers???i have tried installing the sata drivers from the dell website (via floppy) during the F6 XP installation startup sequence, but they were not effective in getting the drive to be detecteddeagletime
9 Posts
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Posted March 14th, 2006 06:00
any ideas?
crstacy
46 Posts
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Posted February 10th, 2006 13:00