my friend just bought an inspiron 1526 at best buy, and while it's an awesome machine overall, it came with the garbage that is vista installed on it.

naturally, my first task was to wipe the drive and put xp pro on it. however, i am running into several major issues. i was able to find video drivers, but am having very little success finding drivers for anything else.

dell support was useless, which was surprising to me as i've got several dell machines and they've always been very helpful in the past...all they have to say on this is that "there are no xp drivers available for that machine at all" and then follow it up by contradicting themselves with "if you want to have xp installed on this machine, you need to contact best buy"

in addition - the machine has a 250gb hard drive installed. xp is only recognizing it as 140gb, it did so during setup and it is continuing to do so now. even in the disk management tool within control panel, it says there is only one disk at roughly 140gb of space on the disk.

i am stuck. i don't want to have to tell him to take the machine back, but i'll do that if it's necessary...i don't understand why going backwards from vista to xp is such a pain, but thus is my situation and i'm in need of help...any help would be greatly appreciated.

Is this an AMD system?

The are a few things you should know, that may help.

Dell computers purchased from Best Buy are sold "as is". There is no waranty or support provided by Dell on these machines. "All" waranty and support is performed by Best Buy. You can call Dell Support all you want, and they will "always" refer you back to Best Buy. There is a "product information guide" included with the computer; you can see paragraph 8 at the top of page 7 in that book.

The computer should run XP fine; but I have not confirmed that for myself. As a safety measure be certain to protect the recovery partition. That partition does work, and you can restore the computer back to "new box" conditions in about 15 min.

There are "two" updates you will need from Dell in order to make the computer work correctly - I know it is required for Vista and would be 99.9% certain it is required for XP.

You will need the Roxio Creator LE driver dated 1/15/08 (LE and DE are the same thing for this purpose).

You will also need the Firmware update for the DVD player (it will not work correctly with out it!). TSST TS-L632H dated 2/20/08. That firmware update can be very tricky, the instrucitons on the Dell site are incomplete and inaccurate.............take your time with it.........turn on file extension (under folder options) so you "know" you are working with the correct files. Also, after the computer does the full reboot with it, it will then do the windows re-install as well (no of this is in the instructions - resolving windows conflicts). Then do a FULL Shutdown (same as if you were putting in new hardware).

You may also want to consider the BIOS update to A08.

All updates dated 1/4/08 and before are already in that mahcine (except for the wireless 1390 WLAN minicard-the real date on that file is 1/21/08 and should be used as well)

Good Luck

well, i m not sure i can help, but i can share some experience of finding drivers
what i can only think of atm, is that you roll back ur system back to vista(hopefully u didnt format the whole disk/all partitions:P)
after the rolling back, u should now be able to know all the devices names in devices manager, then go search for the certain devices' XP drivers
i m sure the HW in ur 1526 will work fine under xp

ps i just looked at dell support web site, what a bs they dont have xp drivers for 1526, my machine is 1520 and it has both vista and xp drivers(of course its a lil older)

tell me if this helps
thanks

oh... about ur HDD, i dont think XP has toublr detecting 200gb disk,if you wanna see if u have any unformatted / unused partition, u can always goto cmd and do a 'diskpart'

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300415

do we used to have fdisk command instead b4?

run windows setup through an xp dell cd or corp or retail cd and have it wipe all the partitions including restore and recovery partitions. (should prompt you to hit "L", delete etc). it will make one large unpartitioned space. install to this using a quick ntfs format. i just did this on a inspiron 1526 and get 232 gigs of HDD space and a perfect xp install.

here's a tip for drivers.

dell inspiron 1526 xp driverset.
these are the sets you need for a complete xp install.. google each file name and you should be able to find them
R175658
Dell_multi-device_A17_R174291(dell support website look under inspiron 1521 xp)
8-3-igp_xp32_dd_ccc_wdm_sb_gart_enu_59746
Driver_5681_XP_0118
kb888111
R17429
R134873
R141246
R147115
R171789
R174291
sp29589
D00758-001-001
HDMI_R168

May 23 2008. Here is a lit of solid drivers I used for a clean XP install on an Inspiron 1526 from Staples with no Webcam on a 1.9 Athlon X2
Search for the below file names on Dell's support site:
http://support.dell.com
R174291 XP wifi driver for Dell 1395 family of G wifi hardware
R166188 XP Driver for Ricoh SD/MS card reader
R147115 XP Driver for 56k Modem
R174511 XP Driver for AMD SM Bus driver (Feb 2008 revision)
R159805 XP_Buetooth_Enable (doesnt seem to work for me)
Bluetooth does not show up in device manager even though it is enabled in the BIOS (ver A11 is what I have installed)
ATI Catalyst Drivers for Radeon Integrated X1270 Video
http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html
Select: Windows XP> Integrated/Motherboard > Radeon X1200 series
Realtek Audio HDMI Driver
ftp://152.104.238.19/pc/audio/HDMI_R192.exe
OR, from
http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/...Level=4&Conn=3
R171789 XP Realtek Audio (possible additional audio driver)
I hope this helps everyone!
Matt