Installing Vista Upgrade needing SATA RAID drivers

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Guest

I have spent the day trying to get my Dell XPS Gen 2 machine upgraded from XP
to Vista. The Vista upgrade advisor sees no problem with upgrading and says
the program will work but when I try to install the upgrade it runs the
compatability check and stops there with:

"You must make the following changes before installing Windows
Close Windows installation and contact the device manufacturer for updated
driver software for these devices:
SCSI and RAID controllers: Intel(R) 82801ER SATA RAID Controller"

I have updated the driver and BIOS and everyting else I can think of but it
still won't even try to install. It just stops at the compatability check
with the same message and won't let me continue.

Every forum I've been to says to use the floppy install of the driver but
that only works with a clean install which is not an option, thus the reason
I spent the money for the upgrade.

So, since I have the proper drivers installed and the Vista upgrade advisor
tells me I can upgrade, can anyone tell me why the damn thing won't work?
 
Unfortunately since the Vista install is essentially a fresh image install
followed by an integration of your existing applications and settings it
needs to have the vista driver available during the installation (weird
isn't it). There are some instructions on the web on how to perform a clean
install using an upgrade.

Joe
 
Well, after 3 weeks of seaching the internet for a way to install Vista I
finally got it to work. Nothing I found out there in numerous forums helped.
Intel only has the drivers that are a few years old already. Every time I
tried to Install Vista it told me I needed updated drivers even though I have
the "newest" ones available.

Out of the two choices my Vista upgrade gives, If I choose the first, to
upgrade saving my setting and such it never lets me past the SATA RAID driver
warning and closes the install. I decided to back up all my crap and try the
"clean" install which I find out doesn't wipe anything, it just puts all your
old stuff in a folder called windows.old but you need to re-install many
programs although some of mine do work run from there.

Anyway, after selecting to do the "clean" install it still told me that my
SATA RAID driver needed to be updated but here it gives me the opportunity to
load the driver from a CD or Floppy or somewhere. I had the floppy with the
most current driver from Intel that is used for the F6 install. So I figure
what the heck I'll point it to that floppy. It sees the file as one it needs
but it rejects it and still tells me I need to upgrade the driver.

From here I'm just fuming and just playing around since the Vista install
tells you to uninstall some programs before trying, so I'm mad at having to
reload those (again) since this attempt failed (again). On a hunch I looked
at the driver version on the floppy (3.4.6.6222) and compared it to the one
already loaded on my system in the device manager/properties area. The one
loaded on my system was version 5.5.0.1035 from the Intel Matrix Storage
Manager. That driver is dated 10/12/2005.

So just to do something while watching TV I restarted the Vista upgrade
install, selected the "clean" install and when it said I needed to upgrade
the driver again I selected "load driver" and pointed it to my Intel
directory where luckily that higher driver was located. It found that driver
and after a minute of pondering my selection Vista started loading.

Even though that driver was already loaded on my system for some reason the
Vista upgrade didn't recognize it as valid until I actually pointed it to the
driver. Weird but it worked and now I'm running Vista 2 days with no
problems (so far).

-So, I selected the "clean" install,
-when it came up with the error I selected "Load Driver"
-then pointed it to my folder Intel/Intel Matrix Storage Manager/Driver
-It found the iastor.sys
-I told it to use that one and Vista loaded.

It seems a simple fix now but I don't understand why it didn't use that
drive since it was already installed. To me Vista was telling me that it
didn't like that driver, so I don't know what the installation program was
looking at until I told it exactly where to look. Plus, nobody out in
cyberspace seemed to know how to fix that error. I just got mine working by
sheer luck and dinking around. Maybe this will help others out there.

Cheers!
 
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