Dimension e510 and XP Pro trouble

[fredbeard]

Buddy of mine gave me his Dell Dimension E510 to work on due to some hardware conflicts. He had a couple BSOD/Stop errors and after messing with it he decided to go on his own and rebuild it without his system restore disk. He wiped his HDD including the Dell system restore section and it still wouldn't work. He gave it to me and I removed his new video card to use the integrated processor, and one stick of RAM he threw in. Then used the disk he got from work to image it (a general Dell image).
Long of the short I've tried rebuilding this thing 3 times now. Full NTFS format w/XP Pro (my own version). Every time I get into the new profile there are only 11 processes running. I can't look at the disc management console or install the video card (or anything else that calls the RPC service) because the RPC service isn't running. Well if I look under services.msc it is running. Another oddity is it always boots into 'best performance' mode. The XP UI isn't running in default mode. I've worked on PC hardware for 8 years and have never seen this. Is there a chip or memory bit in the BIOS I have to clear? That would be my only guess at this point. My next step is to remove the hdd, throw it into my system as a slave and format it from there. I'm really curious as to just what the <beep> the issue is.



Thank you for your time,

Fredbeard the Slightly Terrible

 

[Harvey]

When you say he wiped the drive, did he delete the Dell partition, or is it still there? If so, it may cause problems with your new installation.

You can delete all partions with a utility like Partion Magic, that also allows you to manipulate existing partitions in other ways. If you just want to nuke what's there, you can use Delpart.exe. This is a genuine Microsoft utility that was included with NT 3.1, but is no longer available from Microsoft's site.

Delpart is a DOS utility that runs from a bootable floppy. If your machine doesn't have one, but it's new enough to boot to DOS from a USB flash drive formatted with DOS.

Hope that helps.

 

[robisbell]

sounds like the cd used is not for that system if it's a dell branded one, as for your version are you installing the SATA drivers when you start the installation? I'd wipe the drive, zero, and then try installing proeprly, you will need to get all the chipset drivers and other motherboard drivers unpacked and onto a cd and the SATA drivers onto a floppy.

 

[fredbeard]

@Harvey - He didn't delete the Dell partition but I did. I deleted and formatted everything including the MBR with Partition Manager.

@robisbell - I used the same XP disk for several other systems with SATA drives and have had zero issues. I can give the SATA drivers a shot after this latest install.

In my latest attempt I removed the BIOS battery and am installing XP Pro (no SP) from scratch. I'm formatting the hdd again but I really have to wonder if Dell has some sort of protection installed in a ROM chip on the MB. I don't see anything in the BIOS about it though. Could have the hdd protected in some way so I have to buy their image. I have a spare SATA drive at work I can grab tomorrow if this fails tonight.

I really appreciate all the help you guys are giving me.

 

[daveybrat]

Could very well be that there are hardware problems causing these weird issues. That might explain the bsod's and crashing he was having before. If his hard drive or ram if dying then formatting and reinstalling won't fix anything.

I would test his hard drive and ram thoroughly before you waste too much time on it.

I've worked on many Dell e510's and never had a problem formatting and reinstalling windows. There is no 'lockdown' in dell's bios that would force you to get their image.

 

[fredbeard]

So after pulling the internal battery and reloading another copy of WinXP minus any service pack it worked. Installed each service pack, AV, FW....etc...I ran some more diagnostics and the only problem I found was with his 2gb stick of memory. It failed both memtests. His systems working now so he's good to go.

Thanks for all the help everyone!