On Wed, 24 Nov 2010 06:14:02 -0800, mike wrote:

Greetings technically gifted net-denizens,

I recently acquired an older Dell Dimension 2350 motherboard, along with
what I
believe is the original 48x CD-rom drive. It ended up in the scrap yard
after first residing at the best-buy repair facility (I'm kinda reading
between the lines here, it has a sticker on it which is dated August,
2010 and has their name on it) and from what info I've gathered so far,
it was made some time around 2003 or 4.

I've probably spent enough time so far to reload the operating system
(only tried MS product so far) about 30 times now, and have gathered
info and files from both the Intel and the Dell support sites, I've
done multiple reloads of XP pro w/sp2; but, I finally ended up with a
kinda-successful install by using the restore discs for a E-machines
system that I used to have (that was made around the same time, and had
the same speed processor and a couple other similarities, including an
Intel chipset).

I say it was a 'kinda successful install' because I can start it up
in safe mode and do further set up to it, but it wants me to call MS
product activation before it will boot in normal mode.

Anyway, I think the main problem is that the chipset needs to have some
special software available to it on startup so it 'knows' how to
interpret the OS - it's called
'infinst.exe' and from the literature is spose to be installed in
certain location on the
HDD before XP is loaded (plus, I think the BIOS tells the machine that
the OS should be XP Home, not Pro). When I try to run the chipset
setup utility available from either Intel or Dell, I get a message
telling me that I don't have permission to do that or some such - I can
create the directories specified, but when the program runs an error
occurs and stops the installation.

Just wondering if someone here can shed some light as to what is going
on, and maybe even describe the process that these Intel-specific
machines required when putting in a new HDD (besides cloning from the
old hdd).

So far I've been using various diagnostic utilitiy packages that are
available around the 'net', including 'PartEd magic',
'YetAnotherBootDisc', 'UltimateBootCD 4.1.1', 'UBCDforWIN'; I've found
that I can't run the chipset software from DOS, always get a message
that "this progam must be run from windows".

So, anybody got any hints? As always, TIA.

Mike

infinst.exe is just the Intel chipset driver. I've been dealing with Dell
for 11 years and I've not seen a situation where XP Pro would not install
on a Dell PC that came with XP Home installed. Only anti-piracy theme
Dell has used was to protect their OEM operating system disc from being
used to install on non-Dell computers.



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