Operating system: none standard

When I recieved my 5796 today I almost cried. I set it up nicely on my desk, turned it on, and get hit with "invalid system disk" error. I sat there, hoping something didn't go wrong and I'd have to send it back.

Searching this forum, I came to a realization. When I order my laptop and selected "none standard - only drivers and utilities", it literally meant no operating system. I figured I was going to receive basic vista home edition and that I had the option of upgrading to premium or xp pro, amongst other choices.

Anyway, I've now come to realize I won't have to send my computer back (yay!). I was planning on dual booting linux on the computer anyway, and I had burned both xp pro and ubuntu install cds. When I tried installing xp, I got some stupid error followed by a blue screen. I'm installing ubuntu as we speak, and I guess I can use this as a lesson for learning linux (I've never used it before, and as of now it's my primary and only os on my laptop).

Am I correct in saying none standard = literally no operating system, or is there some disk that came with my computer that would have fixed my invalid system disk error?

 

Ultimately, the answer is to be had from your reseller; however, if it says "none standard - drivers and utilities only" I think it pretty clearly means, no operating system, just the drivers and associated utilities.

 

yes, none means none. If they would have gave you vista for free, they would have advertised that. That option is for "advanced users" (as clearly stated on the site) who like linux or have their own copy of windows.

 

Eh, guess I'm used to buying from good ol' dell and whatnot where no operating system would be unheard of. It shouldn't turn out to be a problem so it's all good.

 

Exactly; why would one want to be forced to pay for an OS one didn't really want in the first place? Folks who buy from _Dell are still paying for the OS, it's just not separately stated in the price (which it really should be, in my personal opinion ). Glad that the situation worked out for you.

 

yeah, but I like this alot more as it passes the savings to people who don't need it. This is the ultimate level of customization with pretty much all the parts that can be fit inside a laptop, unlike the very limited selection on dell.

 

The error you received may be due to the SATA hard drive; which most XP installation discs don't have drivers for.

 

Yep, this is most likely why you got the error. You need to either get the drivers for AHCI or change the setting in the BIOS from AHCI/RAID to IDE I believe. I don't have my laptop here at work but I believe that is the setting. If you have the driver you just hit F6 when the windows installation starts up to load extra drivers. Otherwise to get AHCI to work after you install can be a little bit of a pain for XP but not impossible to do, I've done it on my 9262 after the WXP Pro installation and it worked fine.

 

you should slipstream the most popular SATA drivers to a XP SP3 copy and be done with it.

In a similar note do clevo importers like Sager use Royalty License Oem copy of the Windows OS like dell/hp/toshiba/etc? Or do they just send you a copy of a OEM Windows that I could have bought in Newegg?

 

^^^ agreed...and i could be wrong but i believe they use a regular oem version of windows as i have not personally seen a royalty version from sager / clevo, technically you can simply buy a upgrade version and install as new full one if you know how and it activates perfectly fine with 0 issues, you just have to install twice = ) first time with no key then boot to windows the start a new install from within vista and use the custom setting this time around enter your key then install, boot to windows and delete the windows.old directory and activate... it works perfectly