Driving > Disco

I know this is a little off the regular fare on here, but I found out a gem of a "secret" (or at least uncirculated information) and felt the need to share it. Where else but my post-starved blog?

At work, we recently ordered 2x Dell Latitude D830s. The way we roll, is to order with the most basic "home" style OS (in this case Windows Vista Home Basic 32bit), install Windows XP Pro in house with our site license, use in production for 3 years, then restore to factory conditions and sell to any interested parties.

Only problem was, after taking the better pat of my work week to get XP Pro installed (a travesty in and of itself), I couldn't get the beast to boot into XP. Normal mode, safe mode, you name it mode. The XP splash screen would sit for a few seconds, then a BSOD would flash by, and the system would reboot. Stuck in a loop at that point.

Long story short, the problem is with AHCI support. AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) allows you to drop a bit of flash RAM off of the south bridge of your processor and have any SATA based devices access it directly (kind of a cache for your hard drive that is attached to your processor). AHCI is fully supported in Windows Vista (what the D830s shipped with) but is either only optionally supported in Windows XP or, my vote, not at all. I'm not 100% sure if this is a feature of the Intel processor (Core 2 duo, Centrino duo and Centrino pro?) or of the Santa Rosa chipset, but I guess they are basically one in the same, since you cant really use one without the other.

The fix (as far as the Dell Latitude D830 is concerned, but would probably work with other Santa Rosa based laptops as well): enter the BIOS and disable the aforementioned Flash Cache Module, then set the SATA operation to ATA (not the default AHCI). Save and exit and welcome to the wonderful world of Santa Rosa and Windows XP, hand in hand.