SATA via thumb drive

Hey all,
Been trying to get all my ducks in a row for when my 1510 arrives, DLing drivers and such.

Been reading some old threads/how tos here on doing a fresh install of Windows XP. It was suggested to put the SATA drivers on a bootable flash drive for installation during the Windows install, so you would be in AHCI mode when finished and not have to try to do it later.

Is that the current method of installing the SATA drivers for AHCI?

If so, what is the current method of making a bootable USB thumb drive. I've found a few links to how tos that seem outdated or are no longer up.

Thanks

 

I have never tried the thumb drive method yet. But you can always "slipstream" the SATA driver into a new Windows XP CD using nLite. This way, when installing Windows XP, it is automatically loaded/detected.

 

I currently have a slip streamed XP with SP3. Does SP3 have SATA drivers in it? Even if it did, I guess I would eventually still have to install the specific Dell SATA ones, huh?

Edit:
I just tried slip streaming SATA drivers using nLite. It will only import .inf files, so I extracted the .exe file I got off Dell support in the SATA catagory. I guess they're SATA drivers. They say Intel Driver for Matrix Storage Manger-Notebooks. It has 2 .inf files in it. Lots of different driver versions. Don't know which to choose. Do the driver version numbers correspond somehow to the HDD that's going to be in the 1510?

Or should I tick the "regular PNP" button. I guess that stands for plug n play?

Thanks

 

I usually just get ALL the drivers I can from the package so there is no need to burn different slipstreamed Windows XP.

 

I just realized that the drivers in the 2 different .inf files are either the HDC or SCSI Adapter type. Which do I choose for SATA?

 

There should be a setting in BIOS so you won't have to load the SATA drivers.