On 3/20/2011 6:46 PM, Steve Hayes wrote:
On Sun, 20 Mar 2011 11:40:11 -0500, wrote:

On 3/20/2011 11:07 AM, Steve Hayes wrote:
I backed up the system on the old machine, restored it on the new one, and it
worked perfectly. So it must have SATA drivers somewhere to work with the SATA
drives. I didn't install a thing, just copied the whole lot.

There is a good reason for this. As "many SATA controllers offer
selectable modes of operation: legacy Parallel ATA emulation, standard
AHCI mode, or vendor-specific RAID... Legacy mode is a software
backward-compatibility mechanism intended to allow the SATA controller
to run in legacy operating systems which are not SATA-aware or where a
driver does not exist to make the operating system SATA-aware."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance...ller_Interface

Thus if you are running your SATA controller in legacy mode, you don't
need a SATA driver. Although you also give up the advantages of AHCI.

I didn't know that.

I thought that the drivers must have come in one of those automated updates.

Well if you need a SATA driver (this laptop don't sport a legacy
setting), then Windows XP won't see the drive at all.

If you set it to legacy mode and use Windows Updates, can you get the
SATA driver that way? I am not sure. And I can't test it here since all
of my computers doesn't have a legacy mode.

And your claim that you copied Windows XP from one system and restored
on another system sounds very fishy if you ask me. As unless the two
systems are very much alike, it just won't work. As when Windows
installs, it loads the correct CPU, chipset, etc. drivers for that
machine. And moving it to another system, the odds are great that it
will be all wrong and it won't work at all.

Well, it did work. Windows detected new hardware the first time I ran it in
the new machine, and asked me to validate it or something.

Apart from the SATA drives, the other main difference was the new motherboard,
which is faster and had more memory. It also has speakers, which Windows
detected and installed something to make them work.

I'm typing this on it, and I've had it for about 6 months now.

Well you lucked out then. It was close enough to the old system and it
worked. I have six M465 and the only difference is the CPU and memory
among them. Some are Celerons, Core Dual, or Core2 Dual.

And I swap the drives among them all of the time and Windows XP is ok
with it. Although one game doesn't like Core2 machines. As it refuses to
save and some graphics becomes corrupted. But it was installed on a
Celeron machine, so that might explain this problem.

--
Bill
Gateway M465e ('06 era)
Centrino Core Duo 1.83G - 2GB - Windows XP SP3