Looking for DELL OPTIPLEX GX620 recovery CD - please help!

[ral-clan]

Hi there.

Does anyone out there have the recovery CD for an old DELL OPTIPLEX GX620 PC? These are dual-core PCs from about 8 years ago.

I have one of these computers, but am missing the recovery CD. Apparently you CANNOT do a fresh Windows XP installation without this CD because it contains the required SATA drives (which a bog standard Windows XP disc does not have). If you try without the required drivers (which are only available on this CD) then the computer hangs during installation.

I would REALLY love to buy this CD for a reasonable price, or pay for shipping, or if you could provide an .iso image I could download, it would be very much appreciated.

The GX620 line was really popular in offices a few years ago, so I'm hoping someone out there might have held onto an install CD.

Thanks!

[amramsey]

This is a wild shot, but you might have some success with slipstreaming the drivers into XP using something like nLite (http://www.nliteos.com/). Basically it is a tool that lets you tweak the XP install by adding or removing things from the iso. The older 1.4.x.x versions work nicely with XP.

No guarantee that it will work with this Dell and its SATA disks, but I've used nLite in the past to make custom XP installs for strange hardware and it did the trick.

[srowe]

You should be able to load the driver into the installer. I set up a WinXP system that used a non-standard software RAID controller. You need to hit F6 when it asks 'Press F6 if you need to to install a third party SCSI or RAID driver..."

See this page

http://hexus.net/tech/tech-explained/so ... id-driver/

[ral-clan]

Thanks guys.

I actually already know about the slipstream and F6 options. My problem is that I cannot find a copy of the SATA drivers for the Dell Optiplex GX620. They are not on Dell's website. Apparently the only place they exist are on the WinXP recovery disk that came with this model of computer when new.

I just want to have them in case I need to do a complete re-install in future. I've heard from many sources that if you don't have the driver ready upon installation, the installation of WinXP (from a non-DELL disk) will fail.

Is there a way to extract the SATA driver from my current WinXP installation on the Dell?

Thanks.