XPS 410 -- Remove Info' Screen Between Splash Screen and OS Boot Up

Okay, let's see if this actually posts....

Your picture is not visible but I can suggest a test to identify the issue.  Disconnect or remove the boot drive.  Then boot your computer with a bootable USB drive (Windows installer).  If the Info screen is persisted, it came from your BIOS settings.  If the Info screen is disappeared, it was caused by multiple boot sector detected on your boot drive. 

Use a different boot drive or wipe clean the current drive before installing OS will resolve your issue.

I actually have a 410 with bios 2.5.1.  I had Win 7 installed on hdd.  There was no extra screen between splash and Win 7 boot. My bios sata drives listed under sata 1 and sata 2 the dvd and hdd model under the drive details field.

you might want to check to make sure sata operation is RAID Autodetect/ATA and not RAID ON. There are only two options. My bios is set at first one.

I had replaced battery too.

It sounds like you did a clean Win 7 install. To most people deleting all old partitions is equivalent to wiping hdd.

I used my phone to take pictures and upload. No issue.

Thank you for the responses.

The drive was installed under RAID. The Dell literature for this model said that installing under RAID would give a little better performance than using Raid Autodetect/ATA -- that a single drive would actually operate either in AHCI mode or similar.

I have been a bit suspicious of the RAID mode as several of the things mentioned in the info' screen have to do with the HDD being in AHCI mode controlled by the RAID controller and giving the Intel Matrix Storage Manager Version.

If this weird screen is indeed an artifact of being run on RAID, I would expect the Dell literature to say something about it. Especially when back in the day of this model's youth mechanical HDDs were almost the only game in town and people were boasting about the methods they used to shave a few seconds off their boot time. A thirty second holdup would have been completely unacceptable.

I haven't activated Windows 7 yet, figuring that I might have to redo the whole thing. So, I might do an experiment where I completely wipe (overwrite) the drive and redo Windows still under RAID. If the screen is still there, I'll reinstall under RAID Autodetect/ATA. It doesn't really take that long and the project isn't time sensitive. I'll post the results here in case anyone else is curious.

I still don't know why my picture never showed. It's stored on this PC in the Pictures folder. I even got a green check mark that said it was uploaded and it showed on my post before I officially posted it.

Anyway, thanks for the input!

Grant

Funny that my other Dell also passes Dell logo screen quickly then sits on a blank screen with a single blinking underscore cursor indefinitely.  I figured it out. It was a USB flash drive that it is scanning and reluctant to let it pass. As soon as I unplug the usb, Win 7 pro boot screen immediately appears. Lesson I learnt before and now is that extra screen with blinking cursor is pc is taking extra time to scan a “suspicious” device. Dell logo screen already passed so pc passed basic power on test of cpu, ram, hdd, motherboard but there is something else it is scanning before handing over to Windows. I had seen this delayed boot with a Dell multi card reader on a XPS 730X.  

Regarding RAID I had seen extra info screen related to an add in RAID controller card in old pc. After I remove the card all was fast n good.

on this old model boot up one can do two things: further experiment with RAID and learn about old IDE/ATA (PATA) vs RAID (AHCI) or just be done with ATA and forget about RAID.  I would be done with it if all I need is a fast Win 7 boot up to serve my purpose. 

PS I test installed GTAV on a 410 updated w Q6600 quad cpu and gpu to test for gaming performance on old tech.

Well, the only way I could clear that info' screen was to reinstall under RAID Autodetect/ATA. The screen came up even with no boot drive available, so Windows was irrelevant to the problem.

There are also no other devices attached to the PC to cause issues. Not even an onboard card reader.

At least I started out this time with a nice, completely wiped drive. Like they say about chicken soup; it couldn't hurt.

It still makes no sense to me. Something must be missing, here. Some kind of setting or installation that would fix that issue. I can't believe that the info' screen is a normal and unavoidable consequence of installing a drive under RAID. It just doesn't fly that Dell would establish the RAID setting as the BIOS default and publish material that recommended this for improved HDD performance and then shrug off the consequent appearance of what seems to be a useless speed bump in the boot and reboot process. Users wouldn't stand for such a thing in a culture that puts such a heavy premium on faster and faster boot times.

I would be very interested to hear from a grey-haired and slightly grizzled IT Tech from back in the day with a more intimate knowledge of what worked how with these older Dell systems. I'm not going to lose sleep over this, but curiosity, like a three-year-old once awakened, is hard to get back to sleep again.

For the purposes of this inquiry, I'll give correct answer credit to redxps630.

Thanks again to all who bothered to respond!

Grant

looking back at your original post, not sure if you have tried this:

Reset the current CMOS settings:
a Locate the 2-pin CMOS jumper (CLRCMOS) on the system board (see "System Board
Components" on page 81).
NOTE: When you receive your computer, there is no jumper plug on the CMOS jumper.
b Remove the jumper plug from the password jumper (CLRPSWD) pins 1 and 2.
c Place the jumper plug on the CMOS jumper (CLRCMOS) pins 1 and 2 and wait approximately
five seconds.
d Remove the jumper plug and replace it on the password jumper (CLRPSWD) pins 1 and 2.

I agree this info screen is not expected normal post behavior of a 410 in original working condition.  As you found out it is probably due to bios, try clear cmos, then test for POST when SATA operation is set at RAID ON if you are curious.

Did the CMOS reset. Same result. I didn't bother to reinstall the OS -- the same info screen was there after the splash screen, so...
I'm not entirely sure what conditions the CMOS reset is supposed to alleviate anyway. Never have done it. I also figured that since this PC had a dead battery when I first looked at it and likely had a dead battery for years preceding, that I was starting off with about as clean a slate as you could get when I put the new battery in.
I won't swear to it, but it seems to me that the info screen was there even when I first cranked it up to see what worked and what didn't -- and that was still with the dead battery installed.

At least the reset pins are easily accessible and the jumper is actually designed to be handled with fingers rather than tweezers or needle nose pliers.

Undoubtedly there's some procedural voodoo that hasn't been followed that allows that screen free reign, but like Stonehenge, the Bermuda Triangle and Area 51 the mystery shall persist.

You still could not post the photo?

While you could not remove the info screen, check in BIOS settings for any value that could delay boot and change it.  If it does not fix the issue, change it back.

A couple of settings I could think of, set HDD group as first boot since we hardly boot from CD rom anymore.  Check you NIC settings and turn off PXE boot as network boot seek time can delay boot as well.  And last but not least, check POST Behavior for Fast Boot and turn it ON.

Chino, have done all that. Nothing makes any difference to the appearance of the info screen except not installing under RAID ON in the bios. It's a black screen with fairly large white font listing about nine lines of RAID-related information like the SATA AHCI BIOS version, the Intel Matrix Storage Manager version and specifics about the Controller, HDD and Optical drive with a blinking white cursor beneath the last line.

I recently saw some old posts from these forums that seem to suggest that an info screen and delayed boot time was fairly standard RAID ON behavior for this PC back in the day -- something that I still find hard to accept. The bold type is added by me to highlight especially relevant sections.

One guy was complaining about a pre-boot screen lasting roughly 30 seconds if he didn't respond to a "CTL-I" prompt appearing on that screen to access some kind of Intel Matrix Storage Manager control panel having to do with the RAID BIOS. One response he got was: "The CTL I is normal, but do not think it should take 30 Seconds.   May want to look at you Boot Sequence.   If I have my CD first before the Disc i get some delay.  Now I remove it unless I need to boot of a CD."

I tried the boot order change and it made no difference. I have never seen the "CTL-I" prompt  spoken of.

Another guy was taking some sort of survey from XPS 410 owners to see what SATA Mode setting their machine shipped with. He goes on: "If you do not know how to check your BIOS, you can easily tell if the setting is "raid on".  During the bootup of your computer (every time), it will tell you that your Sata hard drive is controlled by the Raid Technology or some words to that affect.  If those of you (again that have the above computer) don't see anything about raid technology when you boot up your computer, then that means raid is NOT set to the "on" position."

And finally, another post offers a registry edit to allow users to switch back and forth between RAID ON and AUTODETECT without reinstalling the drive. The poster says: "...as it does provide a way to change the boot to RAID AutoDetect / ATA (and save on the Boot time) but still have the option to move back to RAID On if you wanted to have a RAID array at a later date."

I just saved these comments for the heck of it as they support some widely experienced delays in the boot process relating to using RAID ON as the SATA Controller Mode. There are probably more but I don't need to be obsessive about it. Just a matter of curiosity. Nothing that I've read addresses any strategy to skip the screen and go straight from the Dell splash screen to the OS boot screen except by not running in RAID ON mode. Weird. I have other Dells from around the same period (some Precision models, I think) that I believe run in AHCI without any of this info screen business. In fact, I have a XPS 420 that is definitely running in RAID ON mode and it goes straight from the Dell splash screen to the Windows 7 boot screen. So....?

Anyway, like I said, I find it difficult to accept that this is roughly expected behavior from this PC, but it seems that it likely was.

Grant