From: "BillW50"
Date: Sun, 9 Sep 2012 09:38:02 -0500
Subject: Repair problem on Netbook with SATA HDD

Glen wrote
It has SATA support if your BIOS is set to IDE Mode, but
I'm not aware that a clean install has drivers if the BIOS
is set to AHCI mode. Have you clean-installed XP on a
system with the SATA options in the BIOS set to AHCI,
without having to add drivers via F6?

Bill W wrote
When the BIOS is set to IDE Mode, Windows uses the
stock IDE drivers that has been in Windows since
1990 or earlier. Unfortunately for me, my 12 SATA
machines have no such BIOS setting. And five of
them only have a RAID setting as far as hard drives goes.

The BIOS in some systems refer to this option
under SATA settings as Normal/Combination mode.
As in a SATA port that emulates an IDE port to SW,
therefore "combined".