Installing Windows XP on Dell Vostro 1500

Led by Obi Bok's Linux Tune-Up Guide "Slipstreaming Windows CD under Linux" I was able to get an XP Install going on the Dell Vostro 1500. My lady bought this system (1.4 GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 160 GB disk, DVD burner) on sale for $600 (with intel wifi and dell bluetooth) and it's pretty sweet, and well-designed for the modern age, it even has slots which can accept a storage cache card for vista (not that we got any of those.) Vista, unfortunately, is a dog, so the goal was to install Windows XP.

This system has an Intel 82801 SATA controller, and Windows XP doesn't know anything about it. More seriously, the system has no floppy drive, so there is no way to add a mass storage driver to Windows XP. I downloaded the drivers from Dell's website (Dell seems to sell or have sold this system with XP as well) and unzipped them (et cetera) as mentioned in the above blog post. The only place that file is a bit sparse is in the full contents of the WINNT.SIF file; I got more information on that from PC Answers"Slipstreaming drivers" (http://www.pcanswers.co.uk/tips/default.asp?pagetypeid=2&articleid=37086&subsectionid=616) and simply replaced any lines from their file with any conflicting lines from the linux directions. This means any lines which are identical before the "=" (equals) sign. I have a sneaking suspicion that I could have just gone into the BIOS and tweaked it to ATA mode long enough to do the install, then change the driver, and then change the BIOS, but I liked this option better because it produced a CD which can be used to install XP in the future without any monkeying around with the BIOS. I also put the product key in the file to avoid that particular annoyance.

You should be able to do this with or without slipstreaming a service pack as well (see the pcanswers page for those instructions - they might work with wine, but I usually do that sort of thing in a virtual machine.) Actually, dell makes self-extracting archives for drivers and software (zip files? they refer to the unpacking process as unzipping) but I was able to expand it with wine. Some of those archives don't seem to like to be run as just "wine program.exe" but if you run them with a full path (e.g. "wine 'z:\home\drink\Desktop\foo.exe'") then they may work for you. This is actually a common and useful wine trick.

If you are editing these files on Linux, make sure each line is still terminated with a CR/LF pair! You will see "^M" characters in most editors. Copy and paste these symbols for GUI editors; in VI you can copy them by putting the cursor on one and pressing "y", then "l"; go to the end of the line ("$") and hit "p" (paste) to place the character at the end. It can also be typed by pressing ^V^M (control-V, then control-M) so you could just type it that way. Just make sure that the file is consistent or windows might not be very happy with you.

If you have a virtual machine program (like vmware server, which is free-as-in-beer these days) then I suggest you boot it from the ISO image to test. I saved myself from making one coaster this way, but if I had done it the first time, I could have saved myself two. Note that the instructions on driver slipstreaming in the pcanswers.co.uk article did NOT work for me, but I did need information from that page to continue.