I’ve been trying to install XP Professional on a Dell XPS 300 that originally came with XP Media Center Edition. It has a SATA hard drive that requires a driver before Windows Setup will recognize the hard drive. This requires using a program like nLite to create a ‘slipstreamed’ version of XP.
Each iteration of this process involves copying the source files from the original CD, adding the drivers for the SATA drive, and then building and burning a new CD or DVD to try. I’ve done this 3 times so far and am on my 4th attempt. I’m pretty close to just buying Vista or Windows 7 to put on this machine in order to get it to join to a domain (Windows XP Media Center doesn’t join domains by default).
[Update 1/1/2011: I ended up just swapping out the SATA drive with an IDE drive and moved forward. It’s like breaking down and using tables when you can’t get CSS to work (which I haven’t had to do in a while).]