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New Vista Home Premium install not working
I am using the Dell Vista Home Premium re-installation disc on an Inspiron 1545. It is always finishing the install with no errors and restarts to a black screen with just the cursor. I have run diagnostics on all hardware and everything has passed. I've even tried using different hard drives and a different optical drive from another 1545. Each time I have removed the the previous partitions and reformatted the hard drive with a single NTFS partition.
The Windows install disc is scratch-free and has worked fine on a Latitude D600; for which it was not intended to be used. Don't worry, That was just a test and I already put XP back on that laptop to not violate any licensing.
The Inspiron 1545 has successfully taken an install of Ubuntu. So I know the computer and all the components work, its just the Vista install that is not working.
Any thoughts on why Vista will not install properly on the Inspiron 1545(s).
Thanks.
DELL-Jesse L
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September 13th, 2011 12:00
rek57,
Thank you for using the Dell Community Forum.
The system is needing a SATA driver during install. Try going into the bios upon booting up. Once in the bios section arrow down to system configuration, sata operation and change the settings to ATA instead of AHCI. Save the changes, reboot and then reinstall Windows. Once you have windows and the drivers installed go back and change this this setting back to AHCI.
speedstep
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September 15th, 2011 06:00
When Vista is first installed it installs in a low level mode that does not support AHCI.
When it reboots it "can see" the AHCI capable hardware and makes the adjustments in the registry for that.
Then when you change it to AHCI mode it can run in the faster mode. It is not required to use AHCI.
You could run everything in ATA mode forever but it would be slower.
rekt57
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September 15th, 2011 06:00
Thanks. But I'm still fuzzy on why the change from AHCI to ATA and then back to AHCI is required to reinstall Vista from the DVD.
rekt57
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September 15th, 2011 06:00
Thanks for the response. That change worked. Do you know why the SATA setting is set to AHCI vs ATA?
speedstep
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September 15th, 2011 06:00
ATA is the old Setting for EIDE/PATA drives.
Newer SATA Drives can support either mode.
Many SATA controllers offer selectable modes of operation: legacy Parallel ATA emulation, standard AHCI mode, or vendor-specific RAID (which generally enables AHCI in order to take advantage of its capabilities). Intel recommends choosing RAID mode on their motherboards (which also enables AHCI) rather than AHCI/SATA mode for maximum flexibility.Legacy mode is a software backward-compatibility mechanism intended to allow the SATA controller to run in legacy operating systems which are not SATA-aware(WIN98)
or where a driver does not exist to make the operating system SATA-aware.
Operating system support
AHCI is supported out of the box on Windows Vista and newer versions of Windows, Linux-based operating systems (from kernel 2.6.19 onwards), OpenBSD (version 4.1 onwards), NetBSD, FreeBSD, OS X, and Solaris 10 (8/07 and onwards). DragonFlyBSD based its AHCI implementation on OpenBSD's and added extended features such as port multiplier support. Older versions of operating systems require hardware-specific drivers in order to support AHCI.
Some operating systems, notably Windows Vista and Windows 7, do not configure themselves to load the AHCI driver upon boot if the drive controller was not in AHCI mode at the time of installation. This can cause failure to boot with an error message if the SATA controller is later switched to AHCI mode. For this reason, Intel recommends changing the drive controller to AHCI or RAID before installing an operating system. On Windows Vista and Windows 7, this can be fixed by booting in legacy mode and changing the registry. A similar problem can occur on Linux systems if the AHCI driver is built as a module, rather than included in the kernel, as it may not be loaded into the initrd (initial RAM disk) created when in legacy mode; the workaround is to build a new initrd containing the AHCI module.
The AHCI drivers are not installed by default in the Text Mode for windows XP etc.
Windows XP does not provide support out of the box.
When windows restarts it will blue screen with an error.
STOP 0x0000007B INACCESSABLE_BOOT_DEVICE