Dual Booting Windows Vista and XP

Question

I just received a new Dell Dimension 9200 loaded with Vista and I have had problems with my wireless adaptor not working and complaining it can't find wlancfg.exe file. So I thought about dual booting with XP. I do not have a floppy drive. I created a new partition and booted off of my XP cd but I get an errror that XP needs me to insert a Disk drivers disk into the A drive. So I tried installing a floppy drive but the PC does not have a free cable from the disk controller to attach to. Any ideas how to solve and does the Dell support this configuration? Thanks

DELL-Donald K · Answer

Dell won't provide support for a Dual boot configuration, only the OS that shipped on the system.   Apparently your system has RAID enabled, hence teh need for the RAID driver.  In XP, you need to have the RAID driver either Slipstreamed into the XP CD or you need a floppy drive.  Since your system didn't come with a floppy, you may want to try a USB floppy drive to install XP.

Shadowfax01 · Answer

Thanks for the info on Dells position. I thought about using a USB floppy as there is no cable infrastructure in place to attach an internal floppy drive to. Very annoying especially as there is the room to put one in! So do you know which raid driver I need and do Dell have this to download for Windows XP? Also any ideas as to why I get the wlancfg.exe error when installing my Belkin USB adaptor under Vista?   Many thanks

DELL-Donald K · Answer

Actually, I believe there is a 34 FDD cable tucked behind all the drive bays, it should be connected to the motherboard, just real hard to get to.   Media Shield RAID Driver   http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&releaseid=R132416&SystemID=XPS_710&servicetag=&os=WW1&osl=en&deviceid=9711&devlib=0&typecnt=0&vercnt=1&catid=-1&impid=-1&formatcnt=1&libid=41&fileid=175963   Download the latest Vista driver for the Belkin from Belkin

Shadowfax01 · Answer

I already tried the latest driver from Belkin (same as the one supplied) so I am still waiting for either a new adaptor or a solution from Dell. On my other problem concerning the Raid driver, I checked the installed Raid driver that I have on my new PC which is:

Intel(R) 82801HR/HH/HO SATA RAID Controller (iaStor.sys)

So presumably the link you gave me will give me the correct driver to put on a floppy so that when I press F6 during windows XP load the installation will carry on?

I will take another look for that elusive FDD cable!

Thanks

Shadowfax01 · Answer

Hello again. I have another query regarding dual booting with regard to the Sound card which is a Soundblaster X-Fi Xtreme  (which Dell say on their order page when purchasing does not work on XP) Is this true ? Is there an XP driver I would need in addition to my Raid driver on the floppy drive (I now have a USB floppy drive!) for this Soundblaster card? Thanks in anticipation.

Shadowfax01 · Answer

Looking on Dells 'customise desktop' page it states that the following processor is not compatible with XP Pro....... Intel® Viiv™ Core™ 2 Duo E6700 Processor (2.66GHz,1066MHz,4MB cache)   As I have the above processor installed in my desktop am I going to find that dual booting with Vista and XP Professional is not going to work? I am just trying to gather as much info before I attempt this.   Thanks   Kevin:smileyhappy:

Windows General

Dual Booting Windows Vista and XP

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