Computer Hat

I have a SATA drive that shipped with a Dell Optiplex 960, with Vista installed. We still run XP for the classroom labs, so I am attempting to install XP on the SATA drive. I found this blog post, by Wayne Zimmerman, which seems to be the correct solution. It requires “splipstreaming” the correct AHCI drivers onto the Windows XP setup disk, which Zimmerman describes in this post.

Creating a customizable XP setup CD with added AHCI drivers

1. Download and install proper AHCI drivers for your drive. I found the drivers for the 960 by searching support.dell.com for “Serial ATA:Intel Matrix Storage Manager (OS Pre-Install Driver Only)”. The driver installed to C:\dell\drivers\R197541
2. Download and install nLite.
3. Put the XP setup disc in the CD-ROM drive and fire up nLite.
4. Run through the wizard. Zimmerman has a nice walkthrough with screenshots here. Basically, nLite extracts the contents of the XP setup disc to a specified folder on the computer. It then adds the specified drivers to this folder. Then, nLite allows you to create an ISO image file and then burn it to a CD so that you can boot the image on a computer.

Installing customized XP onto SATA drive (a.k.a. “Like, whoa, this is easy!”)

1. Place customized XP install disc into CD-ROM drive.
2. Boot to the CD by pressing F12 at startup and then selecting CD-ROM drive as boot source.
3. Sit back and drink some coffee.

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XP by admin