Duh! I rechecked the setup which showed the hard drive first, then CDROM.
But, there was no number beside the HDD, so it had been disabled. I
selected the HDD, voila! it now boots properly. My bad! and thanks for your
help.


On Mon, Sep 2, 2013 at 6:08 AM, Derek Buchanan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Russ,
>      One question, is the drive inside the laptop SATA or IDE?  If it is
> SATA, that driver did not come with XP.   I found that out the hard way
> doing an image for some IBM laptops for my job.  If I booted with the XP
> install disc and did the install, all was well.  When I rebooted, no hard
> drive found.  I used a USB floppy with a SATA driver to troubleshoot and
> sure enough, I could boot with the disk providing the SATA driver.
>
>     There is a way around it though.  Download the SATA driver from the
> Dell support site.  (You should have a service tag on the laptop to put
> in.)  From there, get a program called Nlite at http://www.nliteos.com/.
> You will need to provide the Windows CD for the install files.  What it
> does is give a windows install CD that slipstreams the SATA driver in and
> it gets installed with the OS.  (In short, the hard drive access will
> actually stay.)
>
> hope that helps,
> Derek
>
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