Dell dimension 4700 will not install xp NEED HELP!!!

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BlakesterGamer

Joined Apr 20, 2016
92
So I picked up this 4700 to load up Windows XP (32 bit) to relive my childhood but whenever I try installing it gives me 0x000007B error I really need help and I tried replaced the CMOS battery the Ram and even the hard drive.
 

djsfantasi

Joined Apr 11, 2010
9,156
Has the hard drive been upgraded from stock? Your error code indicates that setup can't recognize the boot device. All drivers and updates for XP stopped being supported April 2014.

An old Microsoft support article mentions that your boot partition has a virus, and the HD subsystem needs to be bare metal initialized.

Good luck
 

djsfantasi

Joined Apr 11, 2010
9,156
Did they wipe the ENTIRE drive? Including the boot partition and MFT? When you did the XP install, did you have to partition the drives and then format a partition?
 

SLK001

Joined Nov 29, 2011
1,549
XP, by itself, isn't SATA drive capable. If you can find the SATA drivers for your motherboard/chipset, then install them at the F6 option early in the boot cycle. Your BIOS may have a compatibility setting that can get you going (by "faking" an IDE drive), but my experience with DELL computers shows very poor performance in that mode.

If you're lucky enough to only have a wipeable virus, you're still going to have to deal with the SATA driver issue.
 

Danger Mouse

Joined Nov 6, 2016
4
Definitely check hiw the bios is dealing with hdd's. sata +xp = BSOD at install. as mentioned previoysly look in tbe bios for ide comoatability/legacy mode, or a disable ahci option. You can reconfigure after installing xp easily if you can find the sata drivers for your motherboard, or a little more compexly if you cant. Alternatively you can leave your setings treating all drives as ide (my machine on win 10 is still doing this purely out of laziness on my behalf - every boot up i think 'i should fix that oneday' but its been 10 years of one days haha)

Let us know how you go, its a Dell, i find their bios to be bloated with irrelevant options and lught on the ones i find useful so im interested in how you get on.
 
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