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.

Greegor wrote
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".

JP Gilliver
I don't get 'therefore "combined"'; if I saw such
an option, I'd assume it was talking about
something to do with RAID.

RAID on a netbook?

Wouldn't an OEM be more inclined to have RAID
actually labeled as RAID, as a sales feature?

Out of all of the different OEM's, there are probably
several other ways to describe the mode in which
SATA ports present themselves to the OS as IDE.