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Options for upgrading Studio XPS 9100 to Windows 8 Pro
I have owned the Studio XPS 9100 system for about 2.5 years and have been very happy with it. I recently purchased a Windows 8 Pro upgrade taking advantage of Microsoft's offer of a discounted price. When I ran the Windows 8 upgrade wizard, it did not find any issues with my hardware that were show stoppers. However, when I ran the upgrade, the system could not boot up after Windows 8 was installed and the system rebooted. I had to restore the system back to Windows 7, which worked without any problems. Does anyone know what's causing the issue?
I also tried installing from a DVD I burned of Win 8 and at that time the Win 8 Setup stopped at a screen asking me to load a driver. However, it did not specify which driver it needed. Based on searching the net, it looks like it was looking for an updated SATA controller driver. I did not find any on the support site here. So, what are my options to take this PC to Windows 8 Pro? Can Dell provide a SATA Controller driver for Windows 8 for XPS 9100?
The Intel site has several but none of them seem to be for the exact board I have. Or do I need to purchase a SATA controller with enough ports to connect all my drives and use that instead of the Intel one? Appreciate any help or insight.
rdunnill
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March 14th, 2013 20:00
Have you tried a clean install?
PK_99
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March 15th, 2013 05:00
If by a clean install, you mean formatting the hard drive first, then no. What I tried was to create a partition and install from DVD on that partition. But the DVD install is unable to access any of the hard drives. It can only access the optical drives and USB drives. I have tried using several SATA ICH10R controller drivers on a USB stick during the part of the set up when it asks for a driver, but none of them seem to be appropriate. The set up comes back saying the driver could not be installed.
speedstep
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March 15th, 2013 07:00
You MUST install in ATA /COMBINATION/ LEGACY MODE.
After you use the BIOS setup of a Windows 7-based computer or a Windows Vista-based computer to change the Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) mode of the boot drive to use either the Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) specification or redundant array of independent disks (RAID) features, you receive the following error message when the computer is restarted:
STOP 0x0000007B INACCESSABLE_BOOT_DEVICE
Error message occurs after you change the SATA mode to AHCI
support.microsoft.com/.../922976
This issue occurs if the disk driver in Windows 7 or Windows Vista is disabled.
This driver must be enabled before you change the SATA/RAID mode of the boot drive.
To resolve this issue automatically, click the Fix this problem link.
Then, click Run in the File Download dialog box and follow the steps in this wizard.
Microsoft Fix it 50470
Note This wizard may be only in English. However, the automatic fix also works for other language versions of Windows.
PK_99
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March 15th, 2013 08:00
Thanks, I'll give it a try. However, as far as I can tell, I am already using AHCI in Windows 7.
I'm not getting the STOP message you mentioned. After the restart, the POST seems to complete fine and I see the Windows 8 logo. After that, the screen goes blank and the hard disk light on top of the box is lit steadily. There is no disk activity at all. I have tried waiting for an hour (as I was doing other things) and there was no change in status. I had to do a hard shutdown and then use the Recovery disk to go back to Windows 7 at that point.
PK_99
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March 15th, 2013 20:00
@SpeedStep, my BIOS only has two options for the SATA Controller mode - AHCI and RAID. There is no option for ATA / COMBINATION / LEGACY mode. Any other ideas that I could try?