Adding SATA and other drivers to your windows installation cd

  I am trying very hard not to use windows but lately I was forced to. I am the proud owner of a laptop without a floppy drive, and no bios updatter for linux. I thought I would bite the bullet and install windows to update my bios. Not quite so easy. My windows install cd did not recognize my hard drive and when I used the F6 option to install my SATA/RAID drivers from another source, windows could not see my usb drives iether. I searched high and low and could not find a clear answer to my problem. I found several forum posts of people having the same problem as me and no solutions. Just a lot of people saying 'never mind'.

  I don't plan on blogging much about windows stuff but I am all about hacking and this is a hack/solution that I had to do to make something work. I will include a list of some of the struggles I had to go through later on in this article.

  What I used was 'Nlite'. I have used it before trying to customize my windows installation and did not have much luck with it. I decided to give it another try. I was able to find a post in one forum linking to a file on intel's website called 'Intel Matrix Storage manager'. I downloaded and extracted this file and added it to my list of drivers to include in the windows disk. While I was at it, I downloaded all of the drivers for my laptop from the toshiba website and added them as well. I also thought this would be a good time to slipstream SP3 into the cd. Nlite took care of this too. After a couple of nights of beating my head aginst the wall, I had a new windows xp install cd with drivers and SP3. I rebooted my laptop with my new cd in it and it booted up, recognized the hard drive right away and I was able to install windows xp on my newly vulnerable laptop. All of my hardware worked right out of the box. I updated my bios without any problems and I think I will keep this copy on my hard drive for now. I don't know if toshiba will release any more bios updates for this laptop but I will keep windows on a small partition, just in case.

Trial and Error

  At first I had cleared some space at the end of my hard drive and the windows install cd did not see any hard drives that it could install to. So I used gparted live cd to move my other partitions to the end of my drive and leave some free space at the beginning of the drive. Still no success. I tried installing to an external hard drive that I use for backups. After the first reboot I got the error 'hal.dll' (or something) is missing. Please fix this and retry. So next I tried an old hard drive that I had pulled from a dying pc that still had a functional install of xp on it. The first time it saw the MBR and tried to boot but something went wrong. On the second try It could not find the MBR. I know I probably could have just used the vista dvd that came with my laptop, but where is the fun in that? Besides, XP only used a couple hundred megabites of memory on a fresh install and vista uses a gig. Also, I don't like the look of vista or it's functionality.