got a dell optiplex 330 which had winxp service pack 2, an upgrade to service pack 3 led to a blue screen. A reformat and an attempted clean install of winxp failed with 0x0000007B (0xF7ABE524, 0xC0000034, 0x00000000, 0x00000000) error message. A tested linux install worked why and how I don't know. How can i get winxp back on this PC?

This stop error is caused by any or all of the following:

1. if your computer is infected with a boot-sector virus.

2. A device driver issue

3. A hardware issue

4. boot volume is corrupted

5. And I'm sure other issues that I myself don't know about.

Please follow the troubleshooting on this page: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324103 and let us know if this helped.

My guess wil be that a driver -- such as a PCI bus driver, disk driver, or IDE controller driver -- is missing from the image.

I have 4 sata drives; 0-160gb,1-DVD drive,2-160gb, thats what the bios tells me. The same install disk am trying just worked on another PC an hour ago, though the PC has ID E drives only. drive 0- was formatted before the install attempt.

Did you troubleshoot the other issues on the link provided?

Are you using an origianl dell restore cd or a retail copy of XP. A retail copy will not have the sata drivers you need and will need them either slipstreamed or added as a third party driver from floppy disk at the beginning of the install.

That is probably it, lack of sata drivers. My next step might be the slipstream idea, or how about using a ghosted image restore from a similar specs system?

I would slipstream them with Nlite as you need to make sure they are the correct drivers for your system. Below is the link to the optiplex 330 dirvers, there are hard drive and storage matrix drivers, you will probably need the storage matrix for RAID.

http://support.euro.dell.com/support...g=en&TabIndex=

made a slipstream kit, then tried the bios change one more time, changed sata option to sata/ata compatibility just incase and it worked. Thanks alot

As a DCSE I reconize the issue you are having. You need a Dell XP restore cd part number u957g. This will have all the latest drivers for your intel chipset type. Good luck.