When using nLite, make sure at the appropriate time to select Multiple Drivers, select ALL drivers listed, then select TextMode.    The DVD drives shouldn't be attached to the SAS 6/iR ports, they should be attached to the regular SATA ports, so that difference shouldn't make any "difference".  Just make sure you have it connected to one of the three SATA ports: <ADMIN NOTE: Broken link has been removed from this post by Dell> The SAS 6 supports up to two Virtual Disks (arrays), they can be RAID 0 or RAID 1, or one of each.  Your older machine probably has four drives in it - two in a RAID 0 (probably for the OS) and two in a RAID 1 (probably for the data). If you have only two drives in the new machine, then you can only select one or the other - RAID 0 has NO redundancy: one drive fails, data on both drives is gone; RAID 1 is a mirror: if one drive dies, the data is still intact on the remaining drive, and the system stays running as if nothing happened, allowing you to replace the failed disk with no down-time (other than the time to replace the failed drive in the chassis).   Since the regular SATA ports are for your optical drive and you have no other hard drives connected to them, there is no reason to have it set to AHCI, so go ahead and set it to ATA.  If you leave it set to AHCI, then you have to slipstream another driver (chipset) for Windows to be able to see and talk to the DVD drive in AHCI mode. FYI ... on any other system, if you are simply connecting SATA hard drives to onboard SATA ports, you will want AHCI turned ON and you would use nLite to slipstream the chipset drivers into your install, but you don't have to worry about that here, as your drives are connected to another controller (SAS 6/iR).    
Hi, I have a Dell T7400 Workstation and I'm trying to install Windows XP x64 on it. At first I had the problem of the well known blue screen caused by the SATA hdd's or the SAS configuration so I installed the right Dell drivers with a floppy (by pressing f6 when setup starts). This fixed the innitial bluescreen. The problem now is that after I tell setup to install XP on the desired partition and setup is starting the install, I once again get a message that no harddrive could be detected (not via bluescreen but still anoying) Can someone please help, I feel like I've tried at least a 100 things. Also I once did install XP on a second Dell T7400 the same way which was fine. The only difference that I can detect between the two T7400's is that the harddrives are of a different manufacturer (the first a 'Dell' and the second a 'Hitachi') I tried to compare BIOS of the two systems but I could not find a problem. Please help
Error with installation XP on T7400