Reformatting to Vista from XP on an XPS

Hi!
After a few weeks using Vista on my Xps 1530 i used the guides on this site to install XP on my machine. Now I´ve decided to go back to vista but this seems to be a much more difficult task than i first tought. I tried reinstalling with my Vista disk, either by starting it up in Xp or by booting directly from it. But when the installation gets halfway and needs to restart the computer i get a blue screen every time after restarting and trying to continue the installation.

Blue screen message:
A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your
Computer.

If this is the first time you've seen this Stop error screen, restart your computer.
If this screen appears again, follow thease steps:

Check for viruses on your computer. Remove any newly installed hard drives or hard drive controllers. Check your hard drive to make sure it is properly configured and
terminated. Run chkdisk/f to check for hard drive corruption, and then restart your computer.

Technical information: STOP: 0x0000007B (..............)

This seems to be a pretty common problem so i´ve tried a lot of solutions that i´ve found on the net, but none of them has worked. Mainly I think this is because I really don´t have a clue of what i am doing...
But I do suspect this has something to do with the change of drivers for the harddrive before/during the installation of XP.

I would be extremely grateful if someone could help me with this.

/Jesper

 

Did you turn off the ACHI in the BIOs?

Is there a recovery partition also on the drive. Can you navigate to it?

 

I´ve tried fiddling with the ACHI, do you mean while i installed xp long ago or now when i am trying to install Vista? I think i´ve tried reinstalling Vista with the two (?) different options of ACHI.

Yes, I have a recovery partition that i can navigate to. It seems though as i can only use some kind of quick recovery option if Vista is installed.

 

I checked the ACHI and it seems as I have a fully working AHCI driver. And i guess that it is in ACHI-mode that Vista needs to be installed?

 

You need to "slipstream" the better SATA drivers in there. I had the same issue, and the Dell install disk for Vista comes with SP1 and some basic drivers updated. If you're not familiar with how to do this, get vLite and use it to update both the install.wim and boot.wim files. I was going to do this, but I'm just waiting for more stable drivers to reinstall Windows 7 instead (it has all the drivers needed for the install to continue).

 

hi again! thanks for the help, altough i decided to wait and install windows 7 instead.
Two questions:

1) The windows 7 installationdisc cant find my main harddrive when i boot from it to install, does this mean that i need to slipstream?

2) Is this the right drivers to slipstream then (installing windows 7 64-bit):
http://support.euro.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=se&l=sv&s=gen&releaseid=R190641&SystemID=XPS_M1530&servicetag=8HPYC3J&os=WV64&osl=se&deviceid=11530&devlib=0&typecnt=0&vercnt=1&catid=41&impid=-1&formatcnt=1&libid=41&typeid=-1&dateid=-1&formatid=-1&fileid=261693