It’s not fun, let me tell you.

The motherboard in the XPS 400 requires a special driver in order for Windows XP setup to see the hard disks. If you’re trying to install Vista, you’re going to be just fine without these drivers (as they come with the Vista disk.)

However, for the unfortunate few who must reinstall XP on this type of machine, you’ll wonder why you don’t see your disks. You have to create whats called a slip-streamed XP installation disk.

This is definitely not for the non-tech savvy. I don’t know how Dell expects grandma and grandpa to be able to stick their Dell XP CD in and have it reinstall properly (because it won’t.) And why didn’t Dell put the drivers on the XP disk in the first place? Bah.

Anyway, you’ll have to use a program called nLite to assemble this slip-streamed Windows disk.

I’m not going to spell out the directions here, hopefully you can follow along to these instructions.