new problem, the drivers are too big for the floppy i bought (1.49mb) the drivers are 6+ mb, is my only solution slipstreaming them into the disk?

Yes I see. That is strange. The drivers on a standard motherboard are less than 1Mb.

To use those Dell drivers would require slipstreaming but it also leads to second thoughts as to whether or not that is what you need.

The nVidia MediaShield should have made me think earlier. Actually it did but I saw no other SATA drivers. This appears to be a program of some type.

Anyway I am back at square one.

If you open the download you might find specific drivers within it.

Also, if I may ask, why are you building a new computer with a Dell motherboard?

i bought a dell case for 80 bucks, it came with the motherboard, as well as the power unit, so instead of spending 200 or so on a new one i just thought i would be able to use this one

Dell would never consider someone clean installing XP onto their computer.

Therefore their recovery disks most likely had the SATA drivers.

I don't know how far you will get but I'd suggest trying to get an answer from Dell:

http://support.dell.com/support/topi...n&s=gen&~tab=1

See if you can get a Driver or Recovery CD for that particular model.

Or else put the Operating System on an IDE drive and use the SATA for storage.

That MediaShield is a Windows based program for managing SATA/RAID configurations:

http://support.dell.com/support/edoc...N/PY349A02.pdf

It is not what you need.

Anyway if the motherboard has IDE slots I would go with an IDE hard drive for the Operating System. You can use the SATA for additional storage and backups.

i call dell, the man did not help me at all, couldnt even tell me if those drivers were the ones i needed. looks like i am stuck,

Use an IDE/ATA drive for the Operating System.

Are there two IDE/ATA ports on the motherboard?

Like what the DVD/CD is plugged into?

no i have a i have a sata dvd player,
but... i recalled dell and the support guy told me that i can go into bios and find a service tag, which is making some progress!

so for now i will give him the service tag and see how it goes, if not, i will be searching for an ATA or IDE hard drive

btw thanks for your help

You will only be able to uses an IDE/ATA drive if that board has IDE/ATA ports.

I can find no specifications on it. If the DVD/CD is SATA then I doubt there are any IDE/ATA ports.

Thanks for the thanks!

new problem, my code in bios was invalid somehow? i was confused about it so i contacted the store i bought the computer from, they said i did not need a driver to install windows onto a SATA hard drive and i could set up the hdd in bios somehow.

I'd be surprised if that's true. The Dell Dimension E521 hasn't been out very long and so it's unlikely that a standard Windows XP install CD made 5 years ago will have the drivers for the on-board SATA controller.

However, it sounds like the guy from the store is telling you to go into the BIOS and enable some kind of compatibility setting that switches the SATA drive into a 'phantom IDE mode' or something so that Windows will still do the install. I've never heard of that before but it's worth having a look to see if he's right. Sounds like a load of rubbish though!