How do DELL partition hard drives

[nuttyballs]

Hi all, wonder if anyony can enlighten me on how dell partition their hard drives. I have a latitude D420 with a 60 gig toshiba mk6008ga HDD.
I can install linux ubuntu to the HDD and it runs fine, when i try to install any windows op system it stops at "installing windows" and gives the blue screen "windows has stopped to prevent damage to your comp etc".
I have just started Dariks boot and nuke 2.2.6 which takes several hours, so i left it. On reading the screen info it shows that there is a 3.8 gig SCSI disc and a 55 gig ata disc. Dban is treating them as seperate discs and writing over both at the same time I have assumed that this 3.8 gig partition is the dell partition causing the problems but why SCSI.

Dban is still running i will update progress later

As this has no optical drives i am installing from a usb flash drive

Any help would be great
Thanks

 

[LookinAround]

Take a look here as may also be the issue with XP and your hard drive

 

[nuttyballs]

thanks for that lookin, i have read that article but am not much wiser. I tried xp pro, 2000 and 98 all the same result, linux no probs. I also noticed that linux uses a dos partition and windows uses another (cant recall) could this be a contributing factor ?
Dban has written over the SCSI partition "sucsess 14008 kb/sec, still got 3 hours to go on the main partition though.

also, lookin if this is a drivers problem how do i get them on to a unit with no operating system (i have all the drivers for this machine from dell)
Cheers

 

[LookinAround]

/* start EDIT */
I think you're missing the point.

This issue isn't the partitions being created but RATHER the specifics of your hard drive controller and what XP installation disk needs to correctly access the hard drive. (If you have a SATA controller, then normal XP disc will fail as it needs drivers to access SATA or you may be able to tell your drive controller to act like an IDE controller by setting your BIOS
/* end EDIT */

The first place to check is your BIOS!

Check if there's an option to run your drive in IDE compatible mode (or something similar in name).

And if it turns out your problem is missing SATA drivers for XP, do a bit of googling will find you all kinds of instructions on how to load them. (but try the bios check first listed above)