The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    Unattended XP Pro build on a new Vostro 1710

    Discussion in 'Windows OS and Software' started by oldgraygeek, Jul 8, 2008.

  1. oldgraygeek

    oldgraygeek Notebook Consultant

    Reputations:
    92
    Messages:
    118
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    30
    In this thread, I will detail the steps, tips, tweaks and setbacks encountered when I format the hard drive on a perfectly good brand-new Vostro 1710. The goal is to install our valid licensed XP Pro in place of the XP Home it came with. Setup should include 100% Plug-and-Play support for every single component in the machine. If Device Manager isn't perfectly clean on the first boot, I will start over.

    Tools I will use:
    External 2.5" USB-powered hard drive
    Windows Preinstallation Enviromnent (PE) 2.0 bootable CD
    Deploy.cab (from Support Tools) for documentation
    Symantec Ghost32.exe

    The first thing I decided to do was to capture a Ghost image of the computer before booting it into the factory Windows build, so I booted up to a Windows PE CD based on XP... that didn't see the hard disk.
    This could have been circumvented by plugging in a diskette drive with the storage driver and pressing F6 at the appropriate moment, and that fix would have sufficed during CD-based Setup as well, but we're not going to do that...
    I used Windows PE 2.0, which is based on Vista. It had no problem with the SATA drivers needed for that laptop. I ran Ghost32 and captured the image. Step one complete.

    Then, I booted the laptop into XP Home, and it runs fine. I copied the Drivers folder out to the external drive, and also the Bluetooth folders from the Program Files directories. It actually runs perfectly... so, of course, we're going to wipe the drive! ;)
     
    oldgraygeek, Jul 8, 2008
    #1