After my ancient Dell Dimension 8400 got killed by a Trojan I was initially thrilled at my success in installing Ubuntu from a thumb drive and rescuing my data, but then I couldn't get Windows XP to install again.
I tried out using Ubuntu for a couple weeks, and I must say it's pretty awesome. But there are two show stoppers. First, I need Photoshop, Gimp is just, well, gimpy. Second, Netflix streaming does not support Linux. We could watch from the Wii in the living room, but the LCD in the office is so much nicer.
So I tried formatting the drive NTFS, FAT32, but nothing worked, Windows just couldn't see my hard drive. I located my drivers CD and pressed F6 during the initial setup. No luck. Finally, when I was about to resort to setting up a VirtualBox, I found this barely intelligible post in a dell forum:
Its a common problem with Dim 8400. what you can do is enter into BIOS and expand drives and goto sata operation and change it to RAID AUTO/ATA.
Posted by karthiktkv1 on 20 Dec 2008 3:00 AM
That solved it!
