#GATEWAY MASS STORAGE CONTROLLER DRIVER INSTALL#
The reason I ask is that I've spent the last month trying to integrate various AHCI/RAID SATA drivers into XP and don't relish the fact of having to remake the install CD for each new southbridge that Intel, ATI, or nVidia kick out.Well, if your goal is to just have the machine boot up and run, you should be fine in Vista (and Win7) even without all those specific drivers.
#GATEWAY MASS STORAGE CONTROLLER DRIVER DRIVER#
AFAIK that driver (and the underlying ATA port model) was not backported to XP (and it may require a fair bit of work to do so, I don't know) so you're out of luck there. "Advanced" features may require the installation of a vendor-specific driver (just as IDE controllers do when you want access to their RAID features). The goal with the generic driver is to get the system up and running the broadest range of hardware (and with hopefully reasonable performance). I frankly don't know what exact minor version of the SATA spec the generic Vista driver implements (and for all I know that may change with Service Packs or whatever) but the only thing that should affect is what subset of SATA features it enables. That should work with any future controller provided it implements the base 1.x SATA spec (which it should, but never underestimate hardware guys to screw up a good thing). In vista, the equivalent generic driver used for ATA devices (including SATA) is ataport.sys My question is: Where's the generic, universal drivers for SATA, including SATA running in AHCI mode? Wasn't there a basic, generic design in the SATA spec so a generic driver could be used during low-level OS install?The old generic IDE driver in XP (which remains in Vista) is atapi.sys (Technically, that's just the port driver it is layered atop pciidex.sys (the controller driver), and pciide.sys (the generic controller minidriver)). Seems all it does is present the SATA controller interface to the OS as a legacy IDE controller and then translate IDE to SATA commands behind the scenes.
Oh, and the BIOS hack of "Compatibility mode" is not a legitimate answer since it basically disables all the alleged advanced features of SATA. The reason I ask is that I've spent the last month trying to integrate various AHCI/RAID SATA drivers into XP and don't relish the fact of having to remake the install CD for each new southbridge that Intel, ATI, or nVidia kick out. My question is: Where's the generic, universal drivers for SATA, including SATA running in AHCI mode? Wasn't there a basic, generic design in the SATA spec so a generic driver could be used during low-level OS install? It seems that there is a generic IDE driver that Windows and other OS's implement to handle basic I/O until the OS can load more complex, tailored drivers. Almost every OS I've ever used has been able to see IDE devices no matter the age or make of the IDE controller.