What’s the best way to enjoy some free time off work? By spending hours working on a dumb old computer!

So, I was in need for an Windows XP era machine to play with some old games source code, and got my hands on this little Dell machine: the desktop version of the Dell Optiplex 380.

Before I rant about the problems that I had, let me say that I really like this form factor: it is relatively thin, can be used on the horizontal and has a decent spec (for the purpose I will be using it for, anyway). My machine has an Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 (2.93 GHz), 4 GB of RAM and I put a 120 GB SSD on it; it has an DVD drive and no floppy disk drive (more on that later).

As far as I can tell, most computers of this model came from the factory with Windows 7 installed. Putting Windows XP on it didn’t seem like a big deal, however, because Dell still has all the drivers and stuff available, from Windows XP to Windows 7. So, what could go wrong?

By doing a quick Google search for "Windows XP install error 0x0000007B", I was pretty sure that this error meant that Windows XP had no AHCI/SATA driver for the controller this computer has. No big deal, right? Just set the controller to emulate IDE on the BIOS. Well, there is no such option in this particular BIOS (and no, updated BIOS didn’t have it either). Whatever, right in the start of the installation XP should ask us if we have any additional SATA drivers so it can load it - all I gotta do is to download them from the Dell website and we should be good to go.

Well, sort of. Windows XP asks us to use a Floppy drive to load additional drivers, so I went to put one in the machine. But wait - there is no pin header for the floppy drive; I mean, there is the place for it, but nothing soldered on. Dell seems to have opted to not install the pin header to save a few cents.

Sigh. Okay, some of the alternatives are:

1. Use a USB floppy drive.
2. Use nLite to create a Windows XP install image with integrated drivers.
3. Throw the computer in the bin.

Given that I really like the style of this computer, the third option wasn’t a good option, so i tried the USB floppy drive first, as I was feeling lazy and didn’t want to download more software. It turns out that the Windows installer expects an OEM file on the floppy disk to load the additional drivers - and I didn’t have any of that.

Okay, let’s put the laziness aside and try the second option: I downloaded every driver available on the Dell support page, extracted them and made an ISO using nLite. I proceeded to try it on the machine, only for it to give me the exact same error. Oh well, what now?

I was aware that some user made Windows XP ISOs with lots of SATA drivers existed, so I though to give it a try. I went to one of those shall-not-be-named torrent sites, and grabbed one. No luck, same 0x0000007B error.

After wasting many hours trying many other things - from watching videos of Indian guys teaching how to access some BIOS options, to diving in some really old forum topics, nothing seemed to work. I was feeling stressed and was almost throwing the damned computer out the window. What should I do to relax? Watch some LGR videos about old computers, of course! More specifically, the one about a 1999 Sony Vaio.

About 7 minutes in the video, LGR talks about the recovery disks that came with its laptop.

What are the odds that I can find the image of a Windows XP recovery disk for a Dell Optiplex 380, a machine that usually came with Windows 7? Well, I finally got lucky: someone uploaded it to the archive.org in 2022! And, lo and behold, it worked:

Besides that, there is another upload, by @sketch_the_cow, that contains the ISO of the Drivers and Utilities disk. However, I think it would be better to install the most recent drivers from the Dell website or using something like the Snappy Driver Installer.

I think I have to thank LGR too, as it didn’t even cross my mind that I should try to find a recovery disk.

Well, now that I got a working computer, let’s enjoy it for one day before I get back to the work routine. Thank you for reading and see ya!