cannot install on sata hd: setup did not find any hard disk drives...

I have a Toshiba Portege S100 laptop which has a SATA hard disk. I wish to install Windows XP SP2 (English) on it.

The XP install disk does not contain SATA drivers. If I attempt setup, I get "Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer".
I know I have to press F6 when asked to, and feed setup a floppy disk with a suitable driver. The procedure is also described in detail at
http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/tais/su/su_sc_dtlView.jsp?soid=1192841

I found a "RAID driver" (seems they always bundle SATA with RAID even if you only have one HD (*)) on the Toshiba support site at
http://support.toshiba-tro.de/tools/updates/raid-drv/raid-drv-xp-1380-new.zip

I unpacked that and wrote it to a floppy.
I ran setup. Pressed F6 when prompted "if you need to install a third party SCSI or RAID driver". Fed it the device driver floppy when asked. It saw there was a Win 2000 and a Win XP driver on the floppy and told me to choose one. I chose the XP one. Continued with setup, leaving the floppy in the drive as instructed. But still, it then complained that it could not find any hard drives.

It fails while still in text mode, blue background, at the very start; at the point where it would usually give you a choice of partitioning and formatting with NTFS or FAT.

I have also tried pre-partitioning and pre-formatting the HD in another computer before starting the setup, instead of expecting XP-install to do it. It made no difference.

If anyone has any suggestions, they will be most welcome.


(*)
Could it be that instead I just need a SATA driver instead of a RAID driver? Unlikely, because (a) the procedure on the Toshiba site above speaks of a "Toshiba RAID driver / Serial ATA Driver"; and (b) the Toshiba download site does not have any other SATA driver anyway.


Please reply to the newsgroup rather than to me personally.

--

Frank Stajano http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/fms27/
.

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