Recently, I have been having some issues with some old machines I had lying around the house. Since I have started into cutting vinyl decals on an older Roland CJ-60, it's made it necessary to have an older PC around running Windows XP. My Dell Dimension E520 fit the part perfectly, except that no matter how hard I tried, I could not install a fresh copy of Windows XP on it.
Nothing worked.
I tried everything from using different XP install discs, scanning the hard drive for errors, fdisk, erase and refresh the master boot record (MBR), swapped cables (it uses SATA DVD and hard drives) and I even installed Ubuntu on it to prove (mostly to myself) that both the DVD and Hard drive were fine and the issue was either a stubborn virus or a very tricky intermittent hardware issue that was playing games with me.
Each time I tried to install Windows XP, the same thing would happen. It would boot up, I'd push F12 for the boot menu, choose to boot from the DVD drive and Windows XP installation would begin, it would load the drivers and just before it would begin to install files, it would give me a stop error.
After days of running tests, trying things, talking to friends, I came across the solution.
Dell built this particular system and set it from the factory in RAID configuration. This setting is found under the drive listings in the bios (hit F2 when you see the Dell Logo to get into the BIOS settings). For whatever reason, changing the setting from RAID to AUTO clears up this issue. My only question, is why would Dell ship a system that defaulted to RAID if it would only cause problems?
My hope is that anyone else with this issue will find this article and benefit from it!
Each time I tried to install Windows XP, the same thing would happen. It would boot up, I'd push F12 for the boot menu, choose to boot from the DVD drive and Windows XP installation would begin, it would load the drivers and just before it would begin to install files, it would give me a stop error.
After days of running tests, trying things, talking to friends, I came across the solution.
Dell built this particular system and set it from the factory in RAID configuration. This setting is found under the drive listings in the bios (hit F2 when you see the Dell Logo to get into the BIOS settings). For whatever reason, changing the setting from RAID to AUTO clears up this issue. My only question, is why would Dell ship a system that defaulted to RAID if it would only cause problems?
My hope is that anyone else with this issue will find this article and benefit from it!
If you read this, and it solves a problem for you, let me know in the comments!
Jeff.
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