I suspect that you need to install sata drivers since vista will load but either version of xp will not. Sata drivers are not native to the XP operating system and must be installed by completing an f6 install during windows loading. D/L the appropriate drivers from Dell to a floppy and drepress the f6 key when windows indicates to do so. Please post your results either way. Good Luck

First, does the installation CD you are using incorporate Service Pack 2 or later?  You must have at least SP-2 incorporated into the installation CD since anything earlier will not have drivers for the Dimension 9100 PCI-Express bus.

Second, what type of CD drive did you install?  I believe the 9100 normally uses IDE for the optical drive, but some folks have used SATA optical drives for which the typical Windows XP CD has no drivers.

Thanks Jack. Both discs i was using only had SP1 incorporated.

Unfortunately, the Windows XP setup doesn't understand anything but a diskette drive for the loading of 3rd party drivers.  There are a limited number of USB diskette drives that are acceptable, and I rather think that if your system setup can set the "A" drive to be a USB diskette drive you can use one of those.  The most straightforward approach to getting these drivers is described in the instructions for slipstreaming at the nLite web page.  Using that procedure you would make an installation CD that incorporates the drivers, allowing you to perform a normal install.  You can do the same thing to get Service Pack 2 or 3 onto the installation CD.

One shortcut, assuming you aren't interested in RAID, is to go to system setup and set the SATA controller to an IDE compatible mode, such as RAID Autodetect/ATA.  This allows the operating system to use the native IDE drivers which eliminates the need for the SATA/RAID drivers.

 Edited to show that Windows setup requires a diskette drive to load third party drivers.

i dont have a floppy drive, can these drivers be loaded in the same way using a cd?

that sounds promising, i wasn't aware of the slipstreaming process. Thansk a lot for this, i'll be looking into it!

If your machine had a floppy disk purchase option then you probably have a FD connector on the MB. just hook up the floppy, add it in the bios and go. Worked good for me.:emotion-2: