With XP, you actually need a floppy drive to install the SATA "pre drivers" by Intel. After that, I'm lost.
Motherboards from that era, were shipped with that floppy, and you have to pause the XP install at a certain point, install the driver, then continue with the install.(XP announces and pauses that point), and if you aren't going to install SATA drives, you click the notification away
The Intel floppy was supposed to be a "pre-driver". The SATA drivers might be available at whomever's SATA controller is installed in the board. Marvel? Whoever Inthat case, you would have to have the computer up and running, then install some sore of system information program to poll the devices on the board. The maker of the SATA controller might also be mentioned in "device manager".
You're going to run into a lot of aggravation with a pre built machine. Were you building from scratch , with a "buy me by myself" motherboard, it would have the switching in BIOS to go from IDE to ACHI. I the case of your laptop, the BIOS is likely locked to a great extent.
BTW, that fact that Vista came with AHCI drivers, was one of its best features. It's also the one everyone missed, as they were too busy complaining about the OS in general.
