The XPS M1330 and AHCI functionality.

Hi everyone

Having read the very thorough guide on doing a fresh install of Vista on a Dell laptop, I decided I would give it a try, as it seemed like a cakewalk on easy street.
I followed the steps in the guide meticulously (installed AHCI drivers from a flash drive before the actual Vista installation began, also tried to do a cold boot after completed installation), yet it still gives me a 1 second blue screen of death on first boot, and then reboots.
I've also tried disabling AHCI functionality in the BIOS and then installing, which would result in the exact same situation - BSOD and then reboot.
I've also tried with both Dell's AHCI drivers (found on the drivers and utilities CD) and the ones offered on the Intel site. And finally, I tried an XP installation with the drivers integrated as textmode drivers via nLite, which resulted in exactly the same.

If anyone has any help or suggestions whatsoever, it would be very much appreciated.
Thanks.

 

There are two ways to install the AHCI in Vista/XP.

The easy way is install the IDE ATA/ATAPI controller drivers first(chipset drivers) before anything else.
Once you change the setting in BIOS first the flash and then AHCI you should be able to boot into OS no problem.

The harder way is to go through install with AHCI unselected because you can't boot into OS. Install everything else then use the Intel driver and follow their instructions.

There are guides on this site. They are under the heading of downgrading from Vista to XP on your M1330/15 or 17.

Don't get freaked and completely reinstall you OS unless you are going crazy.
It really is easy by following the instructions to the letter.

Intel's instructions were perfect. However, I am a programmer and systems analyst so it was painless. Don't let this bother you as it is really a basic setup.

Good Luck,
Chetanji

 

I had a similar problem when clean installing Vista x64. I opted to disable AHCI in the bios and install.

Not sure how much value AHCI brings to the table.

-Funk

 

I tried numerous workarounds, including disabling AHCI and flash cache altogether in the BIOS and then doing a regular install, all to no avail, so I ended up reinstalling the Dell OEM version and tweaking it as best as I could :-/

 

Well its been a while since anyone has posted in this forum, but I have a quick question. I recently reformatted a dell xps m1330 from Vista to XP. I used the alternate method to slipstreaming ( changing sata to ata in bios). Now that XP is installed I want to re-enable the AHCI SATA drivers. When I try to do it through the bios I restart and get a 1 second BSOD after which the computer restarts. I cannot find the AHCI dell drivers for the m1330 on the dell driver page (maybe because dell doesn't sell the m1330 with XP and thus doesn't offer drivers for the xp version?). However they do have the intel matrix storage manager, which I installed, then rebooted, tried to change bios to AHCI again and still get BSOD. I can use XP fine with ATA enabled instead of AHCI, but I can notice the difference in HD speed (not to mention bios load at the beginning of starting the computer is about 10 sec longer on ATA) and would prefer to get the most out of my laptop. Thanks in advance for your replys. Feel free to email me directly at [email protected] if you like.