Inspiron 1520 windows xp install problem

One of my friend recently got his Inspiron 1520 with vista home premium pre-installed. so he wanted me to install windows xp as second OS aka dual boot. He has licence key for media center from his old PC (which he no longer uses). But he doesn't have his media so i thought i could use my media center CD (which came with my inspiron 6400). If i am right the new BIOS in Inspiron 1520 might not recognise XP and gonna ask for a key so that i could provide one.
Here i got into problem as when i tried to boot from xp cd, it loads all the files and finally when i enter to get into set up it says hard drive not found. Is it problem with my CD or with the computer. Right now i don't have access to regular media center CD (not from Dell).
Any suggestion would be appreciated. Thank you all

 

that is because the laptop has a SATA hard drive, and XP and your Motherboard dont have build in drivers i guess. i had the same problem with my lappy, i still have vista, and only vista

 

That is not an issue with the CD or the computer.

When you have SATA drives, during the initial windows XP installation (on desktops) you have to press f6 or whatever it is, and insert your SATA drivers via floppy drive to have XP recognize the hard drive to further install XP.

 

^^what if on your notebook you dont have a floppy drive?

 

Where can i get SATA driver?

 

You can probably use a USB stick since your floppy drive would probably be USB to begin with... just a guess, I did it a different way.

As for the SATA drivers themselves; you can download them from the Dell site, though they may be hard to find.

 

Try here:

http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/driverslist.aspx?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd

Hmm, can't link to the correct page, but search through the Vostro 1500 XP drivers.

 

wow, that sucks majorly! didn't know that XP needed extra tinkering to install on a SATA

 

It doesn't necessarily need "tinkering"..It just needs you to install the drivers to recognize the drive. It's not hard on a desktop..but I have never faced this on a laptop.

 

Same procedure. Slipstream the drivers in using nLite. Alternatively, turn off AHCI via BIOS.

 

I'm going to try the nlite method, thanks!

however if you turn off the AHCI, and proceed with that method, will xp install properly?

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=143727

heres mu unpopular thread

 

I think you can turn off AHCI during the XP install alone.... Then after XP is installed u can turn it back on and install the SATA drivers for XP.... It should work I presume....

 

Indeed! SATA drivers are not needed for onboard mobo SATA controllers.

We with Inspirons E1505/E1705 had no problems installing XP.

 

I'm ready to go XP have every thing (drivers) but I need to have a confirmation if I need to worry about SAta drivers during XP installation.

And if so, what N lite does?

 

It allows you to integrate drivers onto XP CD so that you don't have to use floppy.

 

But nLite integration process is not that easy although with two or three tries I think you can get it to work properly....

 

I know this is an old thread but wanted to post my comments after installing XP/Vista dual boot on my 1520....

My Vista was installed with AHCI enabled.... As every one metions my HDD was not detected when it was set in AHCI mode and even when I asked the XP setup to search for drivers with my USB stick plugged in and the drivers being present in the root of the drive it never even searched in it (very bad of XP to implement such a stupid feature of only searching from floppies)....

So now I installed XP with the ATA mode and it went on fine.... And then when it restarted XP was automatically booted without giving a choice of Vista at all... So finally after XP install I updated the driver to choose the one with AHCI support (using the Have Disk option) and it asked me to restart.... Now during the restart I enabled AHCI and XP booted on cool....

Now to pull back Vista I had to run the restore boot record option by booting using the Vista DVD and now Vista booted but no XP

Then I pulled the XP entry into the boot menu using easybcd along with my Linux entry and now I get all three options during the Vista startup

 

Integration in nLite is very easy and less problematic, because if you need reinstall or repair Windows you mustn't have drivers on other cd/floppy.

 

The best way to install Win XP OS on the laptop is just to order notebook with that OS. Am I right ?

 

Even if you order one such the people at DELL would have set the hard disk to be in ATA mode only.... So anyway if you want to enable AHCI you need to follow the crucial step

On my laptop I received with Vista it was in ATA mode only....

 

i have a problem too with the inspiron 1520. i bought it with no OS installed. when i try to install windows xp professional, after the setup loads all files i get an error message about a file pci.sys. it says that i should try to disable this driver. can anyone help?