okay, i had a similar problem. i have an emachine W3609. it came with vista pre-installed, but i really don't like vista [maybe after the first service pack it'll be okay?] so far i have upgraded it from half a gig of ddr2 to a gig and a half, and a bigger - faster [seagate 320gb, 7200 rpm with a 16mb cache] sata2 hdd. i plan on going from the 3.33ghz celeron d to a 3.4ghz pentium d [dual core]. anyway, to address one part of this situation, my computer has the multi-card reader. now every time i go to install XP, it gives me an error about reading the drives. it does this four times, one time for each of the card slots. i tell it to continue 4 times and then it goes on from there. as for the second problem - the sata2/raid drivers... well, mine has no floppy drive either so i had to encorporate the mass storage drivers into the installation cd. i did this by using bashrat the sneaky's driverpacks. you can find them here: http://driverpacks.net/DriverPacks/ there you can find driverpacks for chipsets, cpu's, video, audio, mass storage, lan and wireless lans. this is truly great because once you slipstream them to your installation media, you have all the drivers you will ever need. [well, except for like printers, scanners, that type of thing....] i use NLite to remove the 'old' windoze drivers for everything mentioned above. this makes the windoze installation smaller, making enough room to add the driverpacks. i tell you man, it is really great to have all of you hardware installed with the MANUFACTURER'S drivers [not windoze generci drivers] at the time of windows installation! i mean when i install windows my wireless adapter works right off the bat! but hey man, check this out. give it a try. just remember to use at the very least the mass storage and chipset driverpacks, and to make sure you check the text mode drivers for the mass storage so they will bypass the need for floppy disks at installation. you will see this after you download the packs and the driverpack BASE. if you have any problems or need any more info please holler at me. i'm snowdog2k5 on aim messenger or email me at onemorechance2007@yahoo.com hope this helps you out... mike
