Acer Aspire 9300-5317 install XP Pro - SATA?

Hi, folks.

I'm trying to help my brother who has the subject notebook. He recently replaced his hard drive with a 250 Gb one. So all former partitions are gone. He partitioned it in 2 equal pieces. He does have the Acer recovery CD. He says the new drive is SATA; I don't know for sure. Here's why.

When trying a clean install of XP Pro SP3, it goes through the entire installation seemingly properly. No F6 needed to write to the disk. Formatting works OK. Installation goes OK. But after the final splash screen when booting XP, it freezes. Screen is either blank, or has multiple pieces of the previous screen duplicated over and over on the screen. But frozen.

It will boot into safe mode. Drivers can be installed. All the ones downloaded from Acer have been installed, to no avail. Same result. I noticed that when booting to safe mode with networking support, the same freezing occurs, which should be a clue as to what driver is causing the problem.

My main question now, though, is whether I should be concerned about the SATA/F6 situation when installing XP, or would I not have gotten nearly as far as I did had the system needed the SATA drivers.

Anyone with experience doing a clean install of XP on the machine? Thanks a bunch.