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Hi,
I bought a Dell Inspiron 530 computer with Vista pre-installed. I’m having several issues with Vista and I want to reformat my computer and install XP. I initially thought that since XP cannot recognize a SATA drive without a driver disk (using F6 during initial install), I would have to go through the process of slipstreaming the driver .Is it possible? Can I find correct drivers? If not can you please suggest me what I can do to restore this computer.
you DO need to install the SATA drivers during setup, just go into your BIOS and disable the SATA ... Once you have installed windows xp successfully. You get all your drivers from here, save them to a disk, and format away. Ignore the 'support' applications; you don't really need them.
Make sure the BIOS is set to boot from the CD drive before the HDD. Boot from a Windows CD if you have one and format the partition. Once you format that partition, you will only be able to restore your computer using the manufacturer's system recovery discs, burned from that partition, following the instructions in the owner's manual, or ordered from that manufacturer. One other thing to be cautious of is Vista. Check that Dells supports XP with drivers so that if you decide to reformat and install XP that you will have drivers.
Before reformatting make sure that you back up all your important data before you continue. When you partition and format a hard disk, all the data on that partition is permanently deleted. You can view current partition information without deleting your data.
For more information : microsoft