Install Windows XP Home on SATA Drive With Floppy Drive

I'm afraid you've left us a bit confused.  Why would you be trying to install DOS on an XPS 400?

At any rate, you need a Windows XP installation CD that incorporates Service Pack 2.  A CD with Service Pack 1 will not properly install on an XPS 400 as it has no drivers for the PCI-Express bus used for video on this machine.  If you are the registered owner of the computer, you have lost or misplaced your CDs, and you live in the U.S., you can send Dell this form to ask them to send replacements to you:  Dell Replacement CDs.

When you get the proper CDs you will need to boot the CD to install Windows.  That is done by inserting the Windows installation CD in the DVD/CD ROM drive, re-starting the machine, pressing F12 during the self test while the Dell logo is displayed on the monitor, selecting DVD/CD ROM drive as the boot device, and pressing a key when the instruction "press any key to boot from CD" appears on the screen.  You can also go to system setup (BIOS) and place the DVD/CD ROM drive first in the boot order, place the CD in the drive, escape out of setup saving changes, and pressing a key when you see the message as before.

The Windows CD that Dell sends you may already have the SATA drivers incorporated into it, so try it first.  If Windows setup does not find your hard drive, you have two options at that point; first, you can go to system setup and set the SATA controller to RAID Autodetect/ATA.  This places the controller into IDE/ATA compatible mode so that the IDE drivers native to Windows XP can be used.  Second, you can load the drivers from the diskette drive at the F6 prompt.  If you look at the download page you should see two items for the Intel Matrix Storage Manager.  One is very large as it is the application that you are supposed to install on your hard drive after you have Windows set up.  The second is much smaller and consists only of the drivers needed to allow a Windows installation disk to see the hard drive.  The smaller file is the one that you need, but it is a compressed file that must be expanded before you can use it.  To use it, download the file to your hard drive and double click it to trigger the autoextractor.  You should get a box asking you to indicate Open or Save.  It doesn't matter which button you click as both will autoextract the files, but if you click Open, another box pops up when the files are extracted asking you to install.  Just cancel out of it as you don't want to install the files at this point.

The files will normally be extracted to C:\Dell\Drivers\R(whatever number the original file had).  Some of the compressed file packages will allow you to choose to save the extracted files to another directory; you will see a small button on the right with a couple of dots in it.  Click that box and choose your directory if that is available.  Whichever you do, you need to write down which directory the files get extracted to because those are the files you need to copy to the diskette.  Once you have the diskette with the extracted files you will be ready to use the diskette at the F6 prompt during your installation.

EDIT:  By the way, the download page for your drivers is here:  XPS 400 Windows Drivers.

"3.  If they are zipped, how do I install them on a floppy if they are larger than 1.44 mb?"

if the driver you download is more than 300K , then you downloaded the wrong driver, there can be 2 drivers for Sata, one installed while in windows, and the one you want for F6.

Here is the F6 driver for that model, you can use winzip or other utilty to unpack the exe file.

http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&cs=2684&l=en&s=pub&releaseid=R130118&SystemID=XPS/DIMENSION%20400/9150&servicetag=&os=WW1&osl=en&deviceid=8615&devlib=0&typecnt=0&vercnt=2&catid=-1&impid=-1&formatcnt=1&libid=41&typeid=-1&dateid=-1&formatid=-1&fileid=173456

If your laptop does not have a CD drive, then you will need to buy or borrow a usb cd drive to install XP, using the XP home w/SP2 setup disks will allow you to run the setup exe file from the XP CD once all 6 disks have loaded. The error you are getting means the floppy is corrupt, you have to make them again, I suggest using new diskettes. Be sure to connect the USB CD drive with the XP CD in it before powering up the PC and loading the 6 diskettes.

Here are the setup disks you need to use, or it may not have the drivers to find the USB cd drive.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=15491F07-99F7-4A2D-983D-81C2137FF464&displaylang=en

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