I have a system with a Gigabyte MA-78GM-S2H board. It has two hard drives, each with an install of XP Pro SP3. I want to also install Vista or Win 7 and I definitely want that using SATA and AHCI so XP is going to have to be made to get along with it.

One hard drive is IDE, the only IDE device in the box. The other hard drive is SATA, plugged into port 0. Curiously, SATA port 0 is a *slave port*. Way to go on that numbering fail, Gigabyte. I figured 0 should be the master port on the first controller... Also odd is that the default is for the PATA controller to be the first boot device.

When I have SATA and AHCI mode set in BIOS, the XP install on the IDE drive doesn't even see the SATA controllers as needing drivers installed. They're completely invisible to it. I've tried several times following the same procedure that works with Intel chips (of course using AMD's drivers on this one!) but cannot get XP to install the AHCI drivers for the SB7xx series that are included with the XP driver download. It insists that the AHCI driver in the XP 32 folder, provided by AMD, is not the right driver for any of the IDE controllers. (Yes, I do know how to do all the steps to manually install a driver, have only 30 years experience with computers.)

Is there a modded/hacked SB7xx AHCI driver package that'll force XP to accept it so it will work with SATA in SATA mode?

IIRC all I had to do on an Intel chipset was rightclick the inf, click install, reboot to BIOS, change the mode, reboot and XP finished the driver setup. I guess AMD just has to be difficult!

I definitely want that using SATA and AHCI so XP is going to have to be made to get along with it.

Add a registry fix and copy a file

have only 30 years experience with computers

Read the manual nontheless.

Connect hard disk to SATA Port 4/5.

Enable AHCI, but set Port 4/5 to IDE emulation.

Boot XP at IDE mode and install AHCI drivers.

Set Port 4/5 to SATA Type.