Re: "You're looking for something that I'm pretty sure does not exist.
The ICH7 hub is typically the chip that's connected to the 945 to
provide the SATA interface, and no F6 driver is needed for that interface."
That's wrong. Most DESKTOP computer BIOS' provide a BIOS level
emulation of IDE drives from the actual SATA drives. On laptops, this
is always (or even often) not done. But, regardless, you can use an F6
driver to do it for the installation of an older version of Windows (XP
in this case) that does not supported SATA drives for which the BIOS
provides no SATA-to-IDE emulation
Re: "Normally one would get the SATA driver from the PC-maker or from
the motherboard maker. If Gateway does not officially support XP on
that machine, you might be stuck."
Generally that's correct, but in almost all cases the driver provided by
the PC maker (or motherboard or laptop) is just the extracted Intel
driver (or Via or other chipset maker if it's a non-Intel chip).
Re: "It should be on one of the install disks that Gateway included with
the computer."
It's not. Gateway only supports Vista on this model, and such a driver
would only be needed to install a pre-Vista OS that has no native SATA
support.
I found the driver, and in fact I found all of the dozen or so drivers
required to install XP on this machine properly (e.g. EVERYTHING works,
even relatively obscure minor functions (like the flash card reader and
Firewire port), and there are no splats in Device Manager).
FWIW, the chipset is a 943GML (945 family) with a 82801GBM (ICH7M)
Southbridge. The drivers are on the Intel site, it takes a while to
find them (the proper one ... if anything, there are too many files on
the Intel site), but the package is Intel_3100_Windows.zip, and burried
deep down inside that file is f632flpy.exe, an exe program that makes
the F6 driver floppy.
[The part that I think kind of sucks is that the F6 function only
supports a floppy drive ... I don't see a way for it to look on the
CD-ROM drive. And, of course, no modern laptop has a floppy drive. I
happen to have a USB floppy drive, and the Gateway supports it (it's
drive A:, and you can even boot from it), so it wasn't an issue for me
personally, but for lots of people it will be an issue. It would SEEM
that there should be a way to tell XP to look in another location for
this driver, but I don't see it.]
By the way, for a cheap laptop (it's been on sale this week at Best Buy
for $499), the Gateway MT6711 is surprisingly good. 1 Gig of memory,
160GB hard drive, DVD burner, Intel Dual Core processor and the usual
stuff for $499 isn't bad (and it has Vista Home Premium, not Basic, and
it runs Aero).
And now I can run XP as well.
