I recently brought a new Dell M1330 laptop which came preloaded with Windows Vista. The problem with preloaded operating systems is that they almost always come configured with a load of trialware software which is often restricted feature wise and consumes considerable system resources. This aside I wanted to put Windows XP SP2 onto my Dell M1330 as I had several applications that weren't Vista compatible which I used on a regular basis. The problem was that my new Dell M1330 used the new Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) for which there are no drivers on the Windows XP Professional SP2 installation CD, and as my Dell M1330 has no floppy disk drive I wasn't able to load additional drivers when installing XP which brought me to a stalemate. The only option from here was to slipstream the AHCI SATA drivers into my Windows XP installation which is what I'll cover in this article.

The right tool for the job

Slipstreaming a Windows installation was not something I had done in a few years, and while I could've followed one of the detailed guides on the Internet on how to do this manually, I was ultimately looking for an quicker method to get Dell M1330 up and running. After a quick search I found exactly what I was looking for using the GUI based nLite utility, which is a bit of a Swiss army knife when it comes to the creation of customised Windows XP (and Server 2003) installation media. The only prerequisite was that I have .NET 2.0 installed. So with that I went off and installed .NET 2.0 followed by nLite which should not present any great difficulty if you have installed software before.

Getting the AHCI SATA driver

In the case of the the Dell M1330 I needed Intel Matrix Storage Manager which contained the driver files I needed for my slipstreamed XP installation. After installing the Intel Matrix Storage Manager version for for all Windows operating systems the next step was to begin the creation of the slipstreamed XP installation files.

Creating a slipstreamed XP installation

Rather than waste time with creating screen shots of every step alone the way.

Open nLite and proceed through the first few screens until you come to the Locating the Windows installation window as shown below in figure 1. insert your Windows XP installation CD, click the browse button in nLite, and then point select you Windows XP installation CD and press the ok button. Once you've done this you will be prompted to specify a destination directory, which in my case I used C:\xpcd.

Figure 1

Once you've set your destination directory and pressed the ok button nLite will copy all your XP installation files, which can take some time. When this is complete, progress to the Task selection window where you'll need to select the drivers and bootable ISO buttons as shown below in figure 2 (you'll probably get an idea here of just how powerful nLite is).

Figure 2