Installation of Vista Home Premium on a Dell Inspiron 1720

[Zenax]

Hi Guys,

I just thought that I would start this thread, to pass on some wisdom on how to install vista onto a Dell Inspiron 1720.

Now I recently had to do this for my laptop, and let me tell you it was a nightmare.

I managed to get the installation to the last part of the installation where it says "Completing Installation" and then it hangs for around 1 hour, then goes to a black screen with a simple cursor on it.

Now my reasonfor the installation of Windows Vista was that I was experiencing some problems with a few files and decided that it was about time I did a re-install, just to get rid of the rubbish that Dell load onto your laptop when you get it anyway.

Now the way in which to get past this issue (after loads of research ....) is that you have to change some options in the BIOS to enable the Windows Vista installation to continue.

Now, I was thinking, why on earth would I have to change BIOS options just to get an installation to work, It was really bugging me.

So basically to recap:
Go to BIOS ---> Onboard Devices

Go to Flash Cache Module - Turn it OFF
Go to SATA Operation - Change AHCI to ATA

Info taken from:
http://forums.techguy.org/5040811-post21.html

Things must be done in that order. If not the SATA operation will refuse to change over!

Please Note: When using the BIOS change method there is a small decrease in performance. It is not that noticeable but it is there.

And recently I came across another way, which is also listed in the link shown above.

When it comes to formatting your drives into the relevant partitions that you want them to be, you can click on the Advanced drive options, then click on load driver.

Once you have clicked on the Load driver button you must swap the OEM disk to the resources disk you recieve with the laptop. Then simply load the AHCI driver and then install windows (making sure you swap the discs over) and that should also mean that it goes off without a glitch.

I just thought that I would share my wisom with the people of these forums. However I would not know half of the things that I know without the people who know a lot more than me, and share it with people on other forums.

Hope that this might help someone one-day!

Peace!

[Nathan H]

Well, that should help some people at least, well written tutorial

[Smith6612]

Vista doesn't have built-in SATA drivers for the install, just like XP. When installing Vista, you have to emulate the drivers or install some drivers via a disk or the install will fail. I had to do that the first day I fired up my gaming computer and formatted the drive.

[Zenax]

Its kind of an annoying thing though dont u think! However if you change the BIOS settings like mentioned it decreases the performance of your laptop.

I noticed it as it wasn't running as fast as it used to before I clean formatted it

[Smith6612]

Well honestly, if you haven't tried it yet, change the BIOS setting back. Before when I first installed Vista onto my gaming comp, because the motherboard has no P-ATA slots, it came with an option in the BIOS to emulate IDE/ATA drives which allowed me to install Vista. After that, all I needed to do was let Vista download SATA drivers from the internet, reboot, turn off IDE emulation, and I was all set to go. Though I'm surprised as to why Vista being a new operating system doesn't have SATA support during the install of the computer until after install.

Also, I'm still suprised since every computer that I've come across that runs Vista or is Vista ready all have S-ATA drives. There were one or two PCs I came across that had P-ATA drives, but now with people putting their drives into RAID mode and Solid State Drives coming out, I hope that Microsoft fixes their drive support issue in Windows 7. For now, all people can do if they have the knowledge and the time is to master their Vista Install DVD with SATA drivers for the install.