Installing SATA Drivers for enabling SATA native mode after installing Windows XP

If you want to enable SATA Native Mode on your computer AFTER installing Windows XP follow this procedure.

For whatever reason, you may have installed Windows XP on your new laptop with SATA Native Mode disabled in the BIOS. Once XP is installed, enabling it in the BIOS will result in a BSOD upon loading Windows because XP doesn’t have the correct drivers.

Enabling SATA native mode will give you a slight performance increase and slightly increased battery life.

1.  Download the Intel Matrix Storage Manager software for your computer from the manufacturer’s web site

2.  Run it, by default it will save some files to C:\ before it runs setup and tells you that the software is not supported (alternatively you can uncompress the files to a temporary folder with a compression software like 7-Zip)

3.  Now open up a command prompt, go to the folder where the files were extracted and run the following command to extract the driver files: “setup -A -P”path of the extracted files” (without the quotes and there may be a space or not between -P and the path, depending on your version of the driver)

4.  Accept the license agreement, it extracts some files. The files you’re interested in are now in a “Driver” subfolder of the original folder and include the following :iaahci.cat, iaahci.inf, iastor.cat, iastor.inf, iastor.sys, TXTSSETUP.OEM

5.  Now go to Device Manager, under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers you should see something like : Intel 82801GBM (ICH7-M Family) Serial ATA Storage Controller

6.  Right-Click on that and select Update Driver

7.  Say no to connecting to Windows Update to search, hit Next

8.  Select Install from a list or specific location (Advanced), hit Next

9.   Select “Don’t search. I will choose the driver to install”, hit Next

10. Select Have Disk

11. Browse to the Driver folder and highlight the iastor.inf file, hit Open

12. Select OK

13. Now you should have a list of controllers. **WARNING** Selecting the wrong controller for your computer will prevent it to boot, causing BSOD. Make sure you select the right controller for your particular computer ! See this thread on HP forums for the controller inside some laptops: http://forums.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/bizsupport/questionanswer.do?threadId=1057792

14. You’ll get warned that installing the device driver is not recommended, click Yes to continue installing

15. Click Finish

16. Click Yes to restart your computer

17. When your computer boots up, you need to to enter the BIOS. Change SATA Native Mode to Enabled, save changes and exit.

18. After you log into Windows, your computer will find the “new” hardware. Wait until you get the popup message to restart your computer, say Yes to restart one last time.

Credits : http://mytechweblog.blogspot.com