Installing XP on a Dell M1530

[burkhartmj]

OK so I love Vista on this laptop. But I love Call Of Duty a lot more, and it just doesn't play nice with Vista. Because of this I allotted 20GB for an XP partition and planned on dualbooting. I even went so far as finding modified graphics drivers since there are no XP M1530 graphics drivers.

Then I ran into a pretty important issue. The hard drive can't be seen by XP's installer. I'm assuming this is a driver issue with the SATA chip or with the chipset used in the laptop but I'm not sure. I'd welcome any help that could be offered about this.

Oh I'm using nLite to slipstream stuff into the XP install, I just don't know what kind of drivers to get for the hard drive or where to get them, or whether or not those would kick in within the installer itself.

[slonkak]

Use this article to slipstream the SATA drivers onto your XP CD:

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Install-Windows-XP-On-SATA-Without-a-Floppy-F6-47807.shtml

Then goto support.dell.com, select your laptop, and download the second SATA driver, filename R166200.exe. That file contains the driver you need to slipstream.

Here is a direct link: http://ftp.us.dell.com/SATA/R166200.EXE

See if that works for you.

[lnxpenguin4ever]

All I can say is good luck! I tried slipstreaming SATA drivers into my Server 2003 Enterprise disc using nLite, but it didn't work. You could always try turning on legacy support for your hard drive controller in the BIOS, then after installation and patches, disable the legacy support in BIOS. That's worked for me in the past.

And you're going to run into one major issue after getting XP installed...Vista won't boot! That's because XP isn't smart enough to recognize that you have a newer version of Windows installed, and will overwrite the Vista boot-loader.

After installation, you will need to pop in your Vista CD, and click on the Repair option. It should then scan your installation, and automatically determine you don't have the right boot loader installed. If you're lucky, it will automatically detect your XP installation too, and add a menu entry for it. If not, you'll have to modify the bootloader configuration using bcedit.exe (which can be ran from an elevated administrator command prompt), or use this Windows app called EasyBCD:

http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1

Let me know if you have any issues!

[burkhartmj]

I actually got it working pretty well. What helped was a fanmade XP driver pack for the M1530:

http://dropbox.pehu.be/Udi_M1530_XP_Drivers.exe/

A little complicated in the long run, but all is well, and the slipstreamed disc worked flawlessly. I have yet to fix the bootloader, but from past experience that'll be pretty simple when I get around to it.

[burkhartmj]

OK, fixed the bootloader. The Vista repair didn't work [made Vista the only one that booted], but EasyBCD was installed and fixed the bootloader all in about 5 minutes total. Definitely thanks for the tip LnxPenguin4Ever, I've heard about EasyBCD in passing but woulda never remembered it without your post. This thread is officially unneeded, at least by me. Thanks guys.

[trunolimit]

OK, fixed the bootloader. The Vista repair didn't work [made Vista the only one that booted], but EasyBCD was installed and fixed the bootloader all in about 5 minutes total. Definitely thanks for the tip LnxPenguin4Ever, I've heard about EasyBCD in passing but woulda never remembered it without your post. This thread is officially unneeded, at least by me. Thanks guys.

i know this is ancient but how did you get your wifi to work. I've got an m1530 and I've got all the devices working (thanks to you) but i still have a network controller with a yellow question mark on it. did you have a similar issue, and how did you fix it?