Vista install failing on Dell Latitude D830

[Scott S.]

As a MS Partner my small business receives a number of licenses for Vista
Business.
I bought 2 Latitude D830 laptops from Dell shipped with cheapest OS option,
which was Vista Home Basic.
I booted the Partner Program Vista Business CD and choose a custom install
to get a "clean" install. I formated the HD and Vista copied the disk images
onto the machine. It then reboots to continue the install.

When it reboots "Windows" appears with the busy/progress bar empty, it then
makes it 1/2 way across and then reboots again. This will continue in a loop
endlessly.

If I press F8 and pick safe mode, it boots to a message saying ti cannot
continue install in safe mode. If I pick Disable auto restart, then I get a
Stop error 0x0000007B which means it can't find the boot device.

If I try to boot an XP install CD it tells me it can't find a HD to install
to.

This all leads me to believe I need a special HD driver for the system in
order to install an OS on this machine.

Dell support won't support non-OEM OS not sold by them and said to talk with
Microsoft.
Microseft Partner Tech support was clueless as to what is going on and said
to talk with Dell.

Anyone have any idea what to try?

Thanks,
Scott

 

[LVTravel]

As a MS Partner my small business receives a number of licenses for Vista
Business.
I bought 2 Latitude D830 laptops from Dell shipped with cheapest OS
option,
which was Vista Home Basic.
I booted the Partner Program Vista Business CD and choose a custom install
to get a "clean" install. I formated the HD and Vista copied the disk
images
onto the machine. It then reboots to continue the install.

When it reboots "Windows" appears with the busy/progress bar empty, it
then
makes it 1/2 way across and then reboots again. This will continue in a
loop
endlessly.

If I press F8 and pick safe mode, it boots to a message saying ti cannot
continue install in safe mode. If I pick Disable auto restart, then I get
a
Stop error 0x0000007B which means it can't find the boot device.

If I try to boot an XP install CD it tells me it can't find a HD to
install
to.

This all leads me to believe I need a special HD driver for the system in
order to install an OS on this machine.

Dell support won't support non-OEM OS not sold by them and said to talk
with
Microsoft.
Microseft Partner Tech support was clueless as to what is going on and
said
to talk with Dell.

Anyone have any idea what to try?

Thanks,
Scott

Did you download and have available any SATA driver that may be required to
install the OS on the SATA drive that Dell shipped with the system. (XP
would require the SATA driver right after starting the install, F6 and load
the driver.)

Also, other than your possible issue with all the junk Dell ships with your
system why didn't you just use the new Ultimate disk to do an in-place
upgrade for your OEM OS? To the best of my knowledge the only issue you
would have is if you went from 32 bit OS to Ultimate 64 bit OS and that
would have required a full reinstall like you are trying to do. If you are
just upgrading from 32 bit Basic to 32 bit Ultimate I would recommend
rebuilding with the Dell rebuild method they supplied and then do the
upgrade.

Of course if there is an issue with this type of upgrade I hope someone else
will post what that issue is since I am still learning about Vista and am
also getting ready to do the same type of upgrade you have done but mine is
Home Premium to Ultimate for domain network necessity.

 

[Scott S.]

I need the machine to join the domain otherwise I would be happy with Vista
Home.

You can't upgrade from Vista Home to Vista Business, it requires a clean
install for some reason.

I can't legally upgrade the machien to Ultimate bcause that was a
development license, and I am building several laptops for the sales team, so
they require production licenses, so I need to use the Vista Business or XP
Pro ones we get as a MS Partner.

Great point about the SATA drivers for XP. The disk is SP2 version, but it
might not have them. But the Vista install itself ran fine so i would have
thought it would have the SATA drivers by default. I'll look into that in
detail.

Thanks for the quick response,
Scott

 

[jerryw4386]

I need the machine to join the domain otherwise I would be happy with Vista
Home.

You can't upgrade from Vista Home to Vista Business, it requires a clean
install for some reason.

I can't legally upgrade the machien to Ultimate bcause that was a
development license, and I am building several laptops for the sales team, so
they require production licenses, so I need to use the Vista Business or XP
Pro ones we get as a MS Partner.

Great point about the SATA drivers for XP. The disk is SP2 version, but it
might not have them. But the Vista install itself ran fine so i would have
thought it would have the SATA drivers by default. I'll look into that in
detail.

Thanks for the quick response,
Scott

Hi Scots
This error message i have see many times on the Dell froums
Stop error 0x0000007B it means you do not have the sata driver installed
you can use a floppy,pin drive or even CD\DVD drive to install it
or go to the bios and disabe the Raid on to ATA mode or something close to
that and Vista should install with no problems.
Good Luck

 

[Scott S.]

I heard from several people that I needed SATA drivers ... which is what I
was saying it my question when I said I needed special HD drivers.
But the only drivers listed on Dell's site for starage drives were for an
Intel Matrix Manager ...

I finally started downloading every driver for the machine that Dell lists,
and then reading the readme files within the packages.
It turns out that the chipset driver download it the one that includes the
all drivers for all the chips on the motherboard. Once I burned that onto a
CD, during the vista install I could pick to add a starage driver and browse
to the CD where it proceeded to show me a lot of choices. Fortunately I had
a 2nd Latitude D830 in original Dell configuration and I could look in it's
Device Manager. Under IDE ATA/ATAPI contrllers it lists a number of things,
but the only match I found was "Intel(R) ICH8M Ultra ATA Storage Controllers
- 2850".

Unfortunately that name appeared twice in the driver list for 2 different
drivers. So I picked the 1st one then a second time I picked to add a driver
and proceeded to pick the other one. I don't really know if it actually
installed both, since the Vista install doesn't ever list the one it will
install. But Vista proceeded as before to copy images to the disk, extract
them then reboot.

This time when it rebooted, it did proceed to startup and continue the
install. So that was the solution, though I don't know it you need both the
drivers I picked or not.

Anyway I hope this helps anyone else that might run into the same situation.
In the near future anyway because I expect MS will added the necessary
drivers for the newer Intel chipsets to the Vista install witht he next SP
and that newer Vista media will then include that SP.

Thanks to everyone that helped me!

 

[Scott S.]

It turns out all this trouble was caused because Dell shipped with the BIOS
set to put the HD in AHCI mode. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Host_Controller_Interface
for a decription of AHCI and problems with installing an OS that perfectly
matches what was happening to me!
It seems like Dell should have easily recognized the symptoms and told me
what was going on.

Anyway, If I had reset the BIOS to defaults I wouldn't have had a problem
installing the OS, but if I understand things correctly the SATA drive
wouldn't have been using native command queuing.\

So in the long run I guess it is better that I had trouble because I learned
something and end up with a (slightly?) faster laptop.

 

[Scott S.]

HD didn't have a RAID mode, but did have an ACHI mode which is desirable.
See my replys to my own question for the final solution.