I ran into an interesting issue today. I had a customer that had a Windows Vista laptop and like most Vista users they did not care for it. I purchased them a new installation of Windows XP Home and put in the CD only to find out that Windows 'Setup could not find any hard disks'. Hmm, upon further thinking I realized the laptop had a SATA hard drive and Windows XP does not have those drivers naively installed. So what's next?
Well you may remember during one of the first screens in setup it asks if you have any RAID or SATA drivers? Well that's what we need to do but you'll notice that if you do this option it'll ask you to insert a floppy. A floppy? In 2008?
Now if you are lucky you may have a computer with a BIOS that will allow you to turn SATA operation from RAID or SATA to IDE. If you have that in your BIOS than praise your maker because you are done. If you don't have that option you'll have to make a custom Windows XP installation CD and bundle the drivers into it yourself. Don't worry its not really that hard and I found a great tutorial.
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