Sangeetha

Question
Ok. I give up. I've got a gateway MX6919 Retail Notebook that was shipped with XP MCE. I have a retail off-the-shelf full version of XP Pro and I'm trying to load it. The notebook has a SATA hard disk, so I:

1. located the SATA drivers (tried both Intel and Gateway) hooked up my USB NEC floppy and pressed F6 during CD setup boot.
2. It found and read the floppy and I selected the ICH7MDH driver.
3. It found the hard disk, I partitioned and formatted it (spanky clean now).
4. It continued to load and then stops to ask as follows:

Insert the disk labeled:

INTEL MATRIX STORAGE MANAGER

into drive A:

press ENTER when ready

I can press ENTER all day and there is no floppy disk access. I've tried creating a bootable copy of Xp Pro using ISO Buster and putting the drivers on the root directory of the CD in an $oem$/$1 directory or $oem$/$1/sata directory and during setup it seems to ignore that the drivers are there and does not find the hard disk.

Help me, I've fallen and I can't get up.

Sangeetha

Answer
For now, you could install XP without the SATA drivers. To do so, look in the CMOS/BIOS settings of the laptop for something along the lines of "SATA Native Mode". If it exists, set it to disabled.
When in native mode, the SATA controller runs as pure SATA with no backwards compatability. If however you disable native mode, the SATA controller basically runs in a compability mode that emulates IDE and should work with Windows XP's built in IDE drivers. So for this has worked on every laptop we have.

A little info.....
BIOS Settings for Native-Mode-Capable ATA Controllers