Windows, nLite, and SATA Driver Integration... HELP!

[br0adband]

I've searched, not just this forum but many others.

I've burned off a ton of ISOs on CDRW (thank some higher power for rewritable media).

I've grabbed different SATA drivers (I'm using standard Intel hardware these days).

And after a few days of this over and over and over again, I still haven't had one success in getting some damned SATA drivers integrated into the following OSes:

XP Pro SP2 (32 Bit)

XP Pro 64 Bit Edition

2K3 Enterprise (32 Bit)

2K3 Enterprise 64 Bit Edition

And I'm reaching the end of my limits on frustration. I've been using nLite for a long time now, since it first appeared, and it's one of the coolest and most useful things I've ever encountered in my 3 decade long career. Yeah, I've been doing this a long time, so I'm smart enough to say "Ok, I'm stumped, I'm a n00b, and I need some help."

I've followed the various SATA driver integration instructions here at this forum and several others, as I said, and I still get nowhere. The closest I've been able to get so far was with XP64 yesterday. The hard drive was recognized (w00t!!!) for what it was, and I was able to repartition it during the text mode portion of XP setup, but...

When it came to formatting the drive, the setup choked and came up with an error stating it can't write to the drive, so obviously something either crapped out on me or I did something wrong with the integration. But at least it did recognize the hard drive for it's full capacity and specs - I even saw the Intel ICH7 driver get loaded during the initial driver loading before the first menu appeared, so I knew I'd done at least something right at that point.

Gateway MX6931 laptop with the following hardware:

Intel Core 2 Duo 1.66 GHz (667 MHz FSB) T5500

2GB PC2-4200 RAM (533 MHz)

160GB 5400 rpm Hitachi SATA I 2.5" hard drive

The rest is pretty standard stuff, but here's what Device Manager says for the SATA controller and such:

The "Mass Storage Controller" there is the 4-n-1 media card reader that I just haven't installed the driver for as of yet, it's not relevant for now.

So, I'm wondering if someone can explain this me like I'm a 6 year old. I'm making some rookie error here in this process and it's p***ing me off. The drivers I've located are part of the Intel Storage Matrix driver set released on November 8th (about 2 weeks ago). It's for all versions of Windows, 32 bit and 64 bit alike, so I simply don't know what I'm doing wrong when it comes to integrating them, or what step I'm missing, leaving out, or just completely pooching in the process.

All I do know is that I've tried this like 40 times so far, and even with my external 18x Plextor that can burn a CDRW lickety split (I use some 10x CDRW media), this is getting a bit old and turning into a complete waste of time. Vista installs perfectly, but of course it's brand new and it covers all the SATA hardware on the market, for the most part.

I hope someone can point me in the right direction, or provide some step-by-step instructions that work for me - notice I said "for me" since the ones I've followed so far don't seem to work "for me" even with the integration, the config file editing, etc etc.

My intention is to get the procedure down pat and then create my own custom CDs for each of the OSes listed above - with the proper SATA support - so I can just do the software testing I'm paid to do and get the OSes installed properly at least once so that I can then make proper images using True Image and hopefully never need to do this again.

Thanks for your time...

bb