Dell Hell
Sunday, February 12, 2006 at 4:00PM 1 Comment Computer Day came and went. At first blush, it seemed that the shiny new Dell would live up to its promise. Only one problem - the out-of-the-box OS is Windows XP Home and there is a ton of junk - borderline spyware - that Dell puts on their systems: Earthlink, AOL, WordPerfect, MusicMatch Jukebox, bunch of Dell support junk. Jeez. Only one option - go to XP Pro with a full reformat.
Though I consider myself reasonably computer savvy (even if I buy from Dell), reformatting a machine is never a simple prospect. I'm always finding myself in danger of losing years' worth of files or having the install process go horribly wrong, and this was no exception. First, despite the boot sequence, my (perfectly legal) copy of Windows XP wouldn't boot from CD - a necessary step in complete installs. When I finally got a copy that would boot from CD, I thought I was on my way.
But the install choked as soon as the necessary files loaded from the disk. A blue screen of death with a truly baffling error; I searched the Web for "Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your system," and found quite a few results, but it was this page that got me on the right track.
I did what it suggested:
- Went into system setup
- Went to SATA Operation
- Set the SATA Operation setting from RAID Autodetect / ACHI to Combination.
- Rebooted.
- Deleted all the weird partitions.
- Installed Windows XP and changed the setting back.
I don't know why that setting prevented XP from seeing the hard disk, but it worked. XP Pro installed, it will be smooth sailing now, right? Wrong.
In retrospect, I knew I should have backed up that folder at c:\dell\drivers in the Dell XP Home install. But I didn't. Dell doesn't send CDs with the OS or drivers anymore, either. And I guess Windows XP is just so out of date from the hardware that it didn't have any of the drivers onboard. That means my audio, video, DVD-ROM and - worst of all - ethernet drivers are out. No ethernet driver, no Internet. Also, little tip - don't try to install Windows XP while plugged into a KVM switch. Just not a good idea.
I hooked up the old squeaky computer again, pulled the heavy freakin' CRT monitor out of the closet, and got online. Thankfully, Dell's support site did easily get me to the ethernet driver. One short USB stick transfer later, the new box has its ethernet driver, is online, and headed to the Dell support site to get the rest of the drivers. Only there, you don't necessarily know which drivers you need, so it becomes a bit of trial and error to figure it all out.
But I'm writing this from the new machine! Piece of cake.
Reader Comments (1)
When we bought our new laptop (from Alienware), I was amazed that it didn't come with fifteen different kinds of weird spyware. Ran the selective bootup program several times, just waiting for weird TSRs to appear over time....