Dell Precision M6700 Owners Thread

You should still be able to get to BIOS by shutting the machine off completely, then booting it back up and tapping the "F2" key.

If you have NVIDIA GPU with older VBIOS and you turned off "legacy option ROMs" (perhaps to enable the "UEFI Secure Boot" feature), you will get a black screen as you are describing.

In any case, you can revert the BIOS to default settings by unplugging the small CMOS battery. Take the bottom plate off of the system, locate the "coin" battery attached to the motherboard underneath, and unplug it for a few seconds.

 

Thanks for your help. I disconnected the small CMOS battery and connected it back, then I switched it on, the dell logo appears again.

 

I am now using a M6300, I moved the harddisk to the M6700, and switched it on, the xp logo appeared, and then the desktop icons
show on the screen, but after about half a minute, this blue screen comes out.... is there something wrong?
http://s13.postimg.org/p7bitxf6t/DSCN7559.jpg

 

If I understand correctly, you put the drive from the M6300 into the M6700?

You can't really move hard drives between laptops of different generations like that. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. My guess is that XP is either not liking part of your hardware or it is trying to load the wrong driver for another device. If you want to try this legit, you'd have to uninstall every third party driver and make sure you only have the default Windows drivers. Then and only then, swap the drive to the newer laptop and see if it works. It may or may not work and then you'll have to hunt drivers for Windows XP.

 

Usually tries changing raid to ahci in bios. In win8 win10, moving HDD works most of the time, but not sure about xp.

Sent from my 306SH

 

Oh yes. I put the drive from M6300 into M6700..
In the past, before the M6300, I was using M1710,
I put the drive from M1710 to M6300 and it works,
just need to install suitable BIOS and drivers, never
blue screen. This time I did the same but things go wrong..

Thanks for your help.
I think I need to install windows xp from the start rather than
changing drive directly.

 

Well, XP was launched in 2001, both the 6300 and 1710 were from the "heydays of XP" when it was the OS everyone wanted to run, especially in the enterprise word. They also both had core 2 CPUs which don't use the same chipset scheme as the core i series does (northbridge + southbridge for the former and PCH for the latter). Then add that some extra hardware came around such as USB3.0 and so on. My bet is that XP does know what to do with that new hardware or is trying to communicate with it like it would with older hardware and it shouldn't. This is just a guess, but I wouldn't be too surprised if that were the case.

Also, as far as XP is concerned, it would be time switch to a more recent and a more secure OS. If you really need it for something, running your old install in a VM or using Widnows 7's XP mode wouldn't be a bad idea if at all possible. Unless you have someone paying for extended security updates for your version of XP, it is basically one huge danger on the Internet, both to yourself and others.

 

You could try some other things, like using the default Microsoft IDE drivers, removing the CurrentControlSet block in the registry..

https://www.raymond.cc/blog/move-wi...erboard-without-getting-blue-screen-of-death/

https://www.gcsdstaff.org/roodhouse/?p=867

If you were at least on Windows 7, there was a SysPrep option to remove all such drivers and reinitialize on startup (out-of-box experience), but I'm not aware if such an option was already there on Windows XP.

 

To move your Windows install to the new machine, I've had success many times with this.

1. Start Windows in-place upgrade. (Use install media that corresponds to your current OS and service pack level. Start an upgrade, Windows will upgrade to itself. Alternatively, you can start an upgrade to any supported later OS.)
2. Babysit install process. Windows will eventually shut down for a reboot. When it shuts down, do not let it start back up, instead go to BIOS setup (just to prevent boot from starting) and then power off the machine.
3. Move or clone the HDD to the new system.
4. Boot up and allow the upgrade to complete.

Windows will be set up with the new hardware configuration. You will have to do Windows Update again and a few settings will be reset. Apps and data files will be preserved. (Of course, back up your system first, never know what might happen.)

This works with all Windows since Windows 2000. Windows 2000 and XP have a simpler trick though.

1. Move/clone HDD to new system.
2. Boot from install media (same OS and service back level). Install HDD drivers if needed. You will need HDD drivers unless the drive is set up to run in ATA/IDE mode. (Not sure how easy installing drivers will be, if I remember correctly you have to either slipstream them into the media, or have them available on a floppy disk.)
3. Go through the prompts until you get to the license agreement. Press F8 to agree. The very next screen should prompt you if you want to start a repair install. Do that.

This is the same as an in-place upgrade, except you can start it from the install media rather than from within Windows.

Like others have said, the time for using Windows XP is past, you should take a serious look at using Windows 7 (or higher) and put XP in a VM if you really need it. VMware has a tool that allows you to create a VM of an existing physical system. You could do that with XP running on the M6300.

 

Vista was a major revision of the Windows NT Kernel, enough to warrant the jump

All you need is the f6 install files for the Intel RST drivers and you can point the installer to it during the process. It's actually pretty straightforward (for Windows 10 at least). You can either use the RST drivers from Dell or from Intel, the latest version available for your OS.

I had great success using even Hyper-V to run a VM and it is available on Windows 8 Pro and up if you go for an OS other than 7. 16-bit executables and 64-bit Windows 7 and up do not play nice together. The only downside is that passing data back and forth to the VM isn't as simple as with VM Ware. If you have access to it or can pay/get your company to pay for it, VM Ware is a great tool to have for legacy software.