If OFF doesn't disable the controllers, OFF is IDE. In either case - ON is probably AHCI. XP 32-bit has no built-in AHCI drivers, so your options are:

A - Create a floppy disk and copy the AHCI and/or RAID drivers onto the disk. Press F6 during setup for the prompt to insert disk and add mass-storage drivers. If you have no A: drive, a USB Floppy drive might work, but XP resets USB ports during the installation. Later during the install, it might lose connectivity to the USB Floppy and never recover.
B- Slipstream the drivers w/nLite or similar utility.
C- Take the drive out and Pre-load XP from another system then transfer back to the laptop.

B & C are more advanced options, which may require some study on your part if you've never done this before.

Alternatively, XP 64-bit has AHCI drivers integrated; you can try this out and see how it goes.

Finally, I found on Archive.org some pre-slipstreamed versions of XP 32-bit, but it looks like the AHCI drivers on those are Intel-based, however, they might be worth a try.

Thanks! I remember nForce chipsets being pretty nasty and needing drivers but always thought it was for RAID only 😀
I'm now playing around with nLite, been ages since I used it for the last time.
Shame that XP requires a floppy drive to load drivers.

martin778 wrote on 2023-04-16, 20:29:

Thanks! I remember nForce chipsets being pretty nasty and needing drivers but always thought it was for RAID only 😀
I'm now playing around with nLite, been ages since I used it for the last time.
Shame that XP requires a floppy drive to load drivers.

You can try Vista, also, I forgot to mention (and can load drivers from other locations other than A:)

Good luck!

Got it working! Found a clean XP SP3 ISO and slipstreamed the nForce SATA drivers with nLite.
What a hellish job actually, one would easily think the SATA controller was defective (I thought so at first, considering I had to partially recap the board) as both XP and 7 would simply hard crash instead of showing no drives available, that's what I'm used to see with missing PCH/SATA drivers 😁. Was just about to discard the whole setup but thankfully I checked it in HBCD and the controller seemed fine.

Now I just have a different problem - the XP ISO was a clean one so a 30-day trial, of course the CMOS battery had to run flat and triggered the 30 day limit and I cannot log in anymore...

Ok, got Windows XP fully sorted out.
Now trying dual boot with Win7 x64, have re-partitioned the drive to install Win7 but ran into a problem of the PC freezing every time it gets to the "Getting files ready for installation (1%)".
I see the disks and can format them without loading any additional drivers though.

martin778 wrote on 2023-04-17, 16:42:

Ok, got Windows XP fully sorted out.
Now trying dual boot with Win7 x64, have re-partitioned the drive to install Win7 but ran into a problem of the PC freezing every time it gets to the "Getting files ready for installation (1%)".
I see the disks and can format them without loading any additional drivers though.

What about using the x86 version of Windows 7?

The XPS600 has a weird thing with RAM allocation, I have 4x2GB DDR2-667 installed and under XP 32Bit it will only address 2GB, PAE and playing with msconfig won't change it - it's a design issue that's even mentioned in the user manual.
I suspect the 32Bit version of W7 might run into the same problem and 2GB on Windows 7 won't be very usable (okay, it's an antique Pentium D anyway, but still).

Anyway, 3 tries later and after unplugging both the keyboard and mouse just when the install was starting, I managed to get W7 x64 installed. Then connected everything back again - works, W7 x64 shows and uses the full 8GB.
These OEM systems can be very weird...especially the nightmarish nForce chipsets.
Need to sort out the onboard sound now, seems like there are no drivers that work on W7 for this audio chipset and W7 has borked itself after running Windows Update 😀 😀

So I've replaced the SSD with a larger unit but we're back to square 1 regarding Windows 7 install. Each time it freezes somewhere at the installation start screen...replaced the GPU's witha single GT730, replaced RAM, nothing helps.
Strange that XP runs perfectly fine on it.
Windows 11 with restrictions bypassed same story, locks up.

+
And Windows 10 installed without hiccups, what a strange machine. Been running for 4 hours straight, done all the updates too.