step by step procedure for xp installation :
credits to orignal poster
grab nLite from here:
*www.nliteos.com/download.html
hen these two files which are xp drivers for the hardware
*www.mediafire.com/?7hwmn4yfjw2
*www.mediafire.com/?f52jzgdv1ln
matrix storage drivers
*support.us.dell.com/support/downlo...eid=R173412&formatcnt=1&libid=0&fileid=235720
edit:
new complete driver package found here: (Many thanks to Udi for compiling this package!)
*www.uditha.de/assets/Udi_M1530_XP_Drivers.exe
Now, put in your windows xp disc and copy the entire contents of the cd to a folder on your desktop (name it 'XP')
Run the nLite program. Click next until you get to a page that asks you to point to the location containing Windows XP install files. Now you point it to the 'XP' folder you just created on your desktop.
Click next until you see a screen with about 7 or 8 long rectangular buttons on it. One of the buttons will be named 'drivers' and at the bottom one should be named 'bootable iso'. Click them to select them then click next.
(note: You can mess with the unattended install and tweaks settings as well, however, that it outside of the scope of this guide and I will not cover them in detail. If you do not know what you are doing I would suggest just leaving them alone for now and go back and play with them later)
Hitting next after this page should take you to the drivers page which will let you add drivers to the Windows XP install. Now we get to add the SATA matrix drivers to the installation. You need to run the executable file that you downloaded. this will let you extract the drivers to a folder. make sure you either make a note of where this folder is located, or make a new folder on your desktop and when prompted, changed the extraction point to this folder)
Back in nLite on the drivers page there should be a button in the bottom right corner labeled 'import'. Click it and select 'insert single driver'. Navigate to the folder containing the extracted files. Search for the sata drivers folder. Once found, you will be given a list of all the drivers in that were in that folder and you need to select a specific one. The one you are looking for is near the bottom. You need the one that has ICH8M (which is ICH8mobile) and it also must say SATA DRIVER before it and not RAID DRIVER. (or the ahci driver if you downloaded the complete package from Udi) If you want to play it safe you can include all of the drivers without doing any damage by just selecting the first one the shift clicking on the last one which should select them all then click ok or whatever button is on that screen to accept the selection.
You will see a driver pop up in the white part of the screen on the drivers page. Clicking next will bring you to a screen that will ask you to start the process (this is assuming that you haven't checked any of the other options on the main menu, if you did then go through them until you get to the page asking you to start the process) This process will repack the .cab (cabinet) with the new drivers and settings.
Afterwards, click next which will bring you to a screen that will let you burn the changes to a bootable Windows XP cd. In order to burn it to CD you need to select 'direct burn' in the top left selection box. Towards the bottom right corner there is a 'burn now' button which will start the burning process, so pop in a cd and click the burn now button and you will shortly have a bootable Windows XP cd with SATA drivers on it.
Before you boot from cd you'll want to save the two zip files that you downloaded containing all of the hardware drivers for Windows XP. You can write them to cd, store them on an external hard drive or thumb drive, or do whatever you have to do in order to have a copy of them because you will be wiping this hard drive very shortly.
When you are ready to wipe the hard drive and install Windows XP, AFTER having saved the drivers somewhere off of the laptop hard drive you will put the cd in and reboot the computer. On the first screen that pops up that has the dell logo on it, you will need to hit f12 a few times. As soon as it beeps you know it accepted your input. This will bring you to a screen that lets you choose what to boot from. Choose 'boot from cd/dvd'.
After a few minutes of loading you will eventually get to a screen that displays your currently connected drives, this will be waiting for you to input which partition will contain your operating system. There will probably be multiple drives on this screen due to dell installing recovery and media direct partitions, but these are only partitions on your hard drive. To be honest, I really dont use media direct or the recovery partition so I delete them ( by highlighting them with the arrow keys then pressing 'd' then 'L') I leave the choice to you whether you want to keep these two partitions or not. Onward.
Personally, I would recommend having at least two partitions on your hard drive, one for the operating system and one to store files. I like having a separate partition for storage because I can reinstall the operating system without worry of losing files. If you dont want to worry about separate partitions then select the unpartitioned space with the up/down arrows and hit enter twice and skip the next paragraph.
(for those who do not know, a partition will simply look like a second hard drive in windows but will be completely independent from other partitions on the same drive)
To make a new partition you need to hit 'd' to delete the C: partition then 'L' to confirm deletion ( do this for all partitions that you do not want). afterwards it will bring you back to the previous menu which will contain unpartitioned space. To create a new partition you highlight the unpartitioned space (arrow keys) then press 'c' and choose a size for it. For an operating system partition you are usually safe with 20000-30000 megabytes. Personally its been a long time since I've had a Windows XP OS take up more than 25000 megs but you can choose however much you wish. Select the unpartitoned space again then hit 'c' and enter to create the other partition with the remaining space.
Now all that is left is to install Windows XP is select the C: partition then hit enter. Choose format method. (go with NTFS, not FAT32) The quick format will take less than 30 seconds while the other NTFS format will take between 5-10 minutes. To understand the difference between a quick format and the normal format, think of your hard drive like a book. Quick format just erases the table of contents in the book while a normal format will erase all of the pages as well. Either choice will work exactly the same, but if you are worried about security of the information previously stored on the drive then you should opt for the normal, slower format.
After choosing format method the computer will copy the setup files and go through with the Windows installation. From here on out everything is relatively straight forward with the setup process. After the setup is complete the computer should boot up into Windows XP and all that is remaining is to install all of the drivers from the zip files that you saved before erasing your drive. (right click and extract them to the same folder before trying to run them)
Afterward, if you want to check if you've got the hardware installed correctly, you can right click on 'my computer' then click 'manage'. Select device manager in the left frame and anything that has a yellow exclamation next to it is not functioning. If something is not functioning you should try reinstalling the driver for it. If that still does not work then you can either send me a pm or ask in this thread.
another update .. dell has announced that it will be modifying its customer support policy (service terms and conditions for the faulty laptops) .. details not announced yet
