According to the on-line documentation, the Opti 330 has only SATA for the drives, both optical and hard drives. This could present a problem since most Windows XP installation CDs have drivers only for IDE/Parallel ATA drives. Also, for a machine of this vintage, your Windows XP installation CD must have at least Service Pack 2 incorporated into it.
You can attempt to avoid the IDE/SATA issue by going to system setup (F2 on start-up during the self test) and setting the SATA controller to RAID Autodetect/ATA. This places the BIOS into a SATA/IDE translation mode that works with the IDE drivers normally found on a Win XP installation CD.
If you would rather use the native SATA mode, however, you will need to slipstream the SATA drivers into an installation CD that you make using your existing installation CD with something like nLite.
jackshack
6.4K Posts
1
June 25th, 2009 09:00
It is possible; Dell has the drivers for Windows XP on the Opti 330 here: Optiplex 330 Win XP Drivers.
According to the on-line documentation, the Opti 330 has only SATA for the drives, both optical and hard drives. This could present a problem since most Windows XP installation CDs have drivers only for IDE/Parallel ATA drives. Also, for a machine of this vintage, your Windows XP installation CD must have at least Service Pack 2 incorporated into it.
You can attempt to avoid the IDE/SATA issue by going to system setup (F2 on start-up during the self test) and setting the SATA controller to RAID Autodetect/ATA. This places the BIOS into a SATA/IDE translation mode that works with the IDE drivers normally found on a Win XP installation CD.
If you would rather use the native SATA mode, however, you will need to slipstream the SATA drivers into an installation CD that you make using your existing installation CD with something like nLite.