Endless Paradigm

The basic story is:

My grandmother (wonderful things aren't they?) bought me a lappy about a  week ago and it arrived yesterday. Being new it came with Vista and being the fair person I am I gave it a try. I would only get rid of if if I had more than 15 problems within an hour. I had 37. (Incompatible hardware/software, having to use Help and Support to find out how to do something that was easy in XP, etc...)

The laptop is a Toshiba A300-1BZ with a Core2Duo T8100, 3GB of RAM, 250GB HDD, Intel 965 Mobile Chipset...

Anyways, I've since put XP on the thing and all is working fine, except for one thing. When I was installing I had to put the SATA controller into compatability mode before the XP installer would see it. After I installed I put the controller back into AHCI mode and XP BSOD'd on booting. So I put it back into Compatability mode realising I'd forgotten to install the driver. Thing is though, I've had a look on the Intel Website (965 mobile chipset with ICH8) and all the different drivers say that "Your computer does not meet the minimum requirements" when I go to install them. Could anyone point me towards a compatible driver? It all works in compatability mode but that big yellow question mark in Device Manager is pissing me off...

In fairness, if its working in compatibility, then why bother? Are you noticing any performance drop? Its not like the device manager is popping up at every boot.

meh...

once you are booted with sata in compatability mode you need to install the ahci driver if you want to boot from it..

Right now windows has no idea that device exists so whne you boot after making that change the boot loader starts up, then windows starts up and windows says 'hey, where'd that harddrive go?'

It is much better to install that driver from floppy at F6 thne install...but this way should work also if there is a seperate driver for xp for ahci.

let's hope it doesn't have too many problems or wee'll never be able to record our demo.....
(i have the money by the way....)

I have my HDD on AHCI but Windows doesn't seem to like it if I disable it.
AHCI mainly adds NCQ which may improve performance a little, though I'm not sure whether you'd really notice it or not.

If you can't use the F6 option, I typically integrate the driver into the installation with nLite.

For your current situation, you could try installing the driver by installing the INF directly?

The laptop has no floppy drive so the F6 @ install may not work... Do you think a USB floppy would work? I've found a driver that's designed to be put on a floppy for the F6 procedure but what exactly do I need to do? Just copy the files onto a floppy or do I need a program that makes the floppy bootable?

As for integrating the driver, I may look into that...

EDIT: I just did a little googling and I came across this: How to enable AHCI in Windows XP

Anyone know if it works?

PSPkiller Wrote:EDIT: I just did a little googling and I came across this: How to enable AHCI in Windows XP

Anyone know if it works?

Sounds like the solution I suggested, just going through different steps.
It shouldn't cause an issue - at worst, you'll install a driver that does nothing.