Friday, April 9, 2010

Downgrading from Vista 32-bit to XP Professional

I have a Dell XPS 720 that I'm trying to downgrade from Vista 32-bit to XP Professional. Downgrade is probably not the right word since both my hard drives have nothing on it at the moment. I have two 250 GB hard drives that are were set up for RAID 0 when I bought the system. I will get back to this later. This is the problem. I boot up my computer from the Windows XP Professional CD, setup begins, I press F6 to load the drivers. I had a issue where if I did not press F6 and upload the drivers, setup would eventually lead me to the blue screen of death. Anyways, I downloaded this driver http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspxc=us%26cs=19%26l=en%26s=dhs%26releaseid=R164975%26SystemID=XPS_720%26servicetag=%26os=WW1%26osl=en%26deviceid=9711%26devlib=0%26typecnt=0%26vercnt=1%26catid=-1%26impid=-1%26formatcnt=1%26libid=41%26fileid=221848 and I copied the files to a floppy disk and placed it into my USB external floppy drive. I don't even know if this is the right driver, but it worked none the less. I loaded the drivers and I formatted the unpartitioned space using the NTFS file system. Setup then proceeds to copy some files, yada yada, tells me to remove the boot disk, and it says that the it will reboot in 15 seconds. I'm home free. My dell screen loads. When Windows XP Professional Setup should be loading, It takes me to a black screen where it says that ''Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware. Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information.''I am not sure what my BIOS settings should be if I have RAID 0. I have setted the BIOS to default and changed it back to what I believed to be what it was before I even went to the BIOS for the first time. Same goes for RAID Setup. Right now I believe I have one array. It's listed as O HEALTHY NVIDIA STRIPED 500GB(estimate). I would sure appreciate any help. Thanks. Andrew ***I'm editting this in just incase if my BIOS info will help solving this problem***When I am in the BIOS, under DRIVES. This is what I have listedDiskette Drive - USBSATA-0 RAID ONSATA-1 RAID ONSATA-2 OFFSATA-3 OFFSATA-4 OFFSATA-5 OFFPATA-0 OFFPATA-1 OFFSMART REPORTING- OFF

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