Hello!

 

I've just gotten a new Dell XPS 210 computer. It's my first computer with purely SATA drives and it's giving me some problems. I want to install Windows XP and delete Vista.

 

First off I can't use my normal boot CD as it doesn't find the CD-rom drive. Neither will it find an external USB CD-rom. I've tried creating a boot CD with the "gcdrom.sys" file ( http://www.911cd.net/forums//lofiversion/index.php?t18722.html) but still no go.

 

Then I tried the Windows XP SP2 and it could boot on that but crashed with a 0x0000007B error ( http://tinyurl.com/2k83y4).

 

Then I bought a USB floppy USB drive because I thought I could do the F6 trick to install the driver ( http://tinyurl.com/378866) but it turns out the XP installation can't even see the hard drive. I think this is strange because when I boot with Partition Magic floppy disks the program CAN see the disk and I can also partition it.

 

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Host_Controller_Interface I found this:

 

"Enabling AHCI in a system BIOS will cause a 0x7B Blue Screen of Death STOP error on installations of Windows XP where AHCI/RAID drivers for that system's chipset are not installed. Switching to AHCI mode requires installing new drivers before changing the BIOS settings. "

 

The controller is a "Intel Serial ATA AHCI Bios Version ISRC 1.02.23". How can I find the drivers for this? I can't seem to find it on Dell's website.

 

What to do?

 

Regards
Jimmy