Hyram

Your guide, Fernando1, matches what I do, just with a lot more detail, and is your usual excellent reference material. I've learned quite a bit from you over the years stumbling across your guides, so many many thanks Adding the MSM drivers to an XP SP3 installer definitely isn't a problem, I've been using nLite for a long time -- I was my community's go-to man for upgrading brand new laptops from Vista to XP and built many a customised XP disc for the new owners with AHCI support and all the XP drivers for their otherwise-not-supported machines. My question this time relates to hot-plug eSATA with the ICH chips and XP, specifically the ICH10R in my latest upgrade, a Core 2 Quad living in a GA-EP45-UD3R. How the bleedin' 'eck can it be enabled?! I have no problems getting "hotswap" capability on the EP45 with Windows 7 -- I've even learned how to designate which of the ICH10R's ports can be hotswap and which ones are not. Once set up and all but a pair of ports set to "TreatAsInternalPort" (via a small bit of manual registry tweaking I learned) it works and works well. Drives in my external cradles connected to the hotswap-capable ports appear under "Safely remove device" and spin down for ejection, and a fresh drive will be mounted when I pop it in. The only problem is that I can't use Windows 7 for my main computing task (music production) because of the way the Win7 WASAPI layer plays havoc with multiple audio channels that require perfect precision and extremely low latency -- for music, I still use XP Professional SP3 32-bit. Now, for the life of me, I can not get any ICH10R SATA port to be hot-pluggable under XP! I have read and read til my eyes go square, I have made dozens of variations of an AHCI-bearing XP installer, I've tried manual driver shifts, many different versions of the Intel software, but nothing has ever worked. If you can shed any light on this peculiarity, and let me enjoy eSATA as it was intended, I wll be eternally grateful!