ACER iDEA with Intel ICH7 onboard SATA

Hi there,

I recently spent a couple of days troubleshooting a problem with installing XP on an Acer iDEA 500.
When you combine the appalling support of Acer with the lack of availability of drivers from their website, it makes reinstalling XP quite difficult.

Firstly, I want to say thanks for a great piece of software - it saved me a lot of time and effort. It helped identify what controller the Acer was using, and taught me more than I ever needed to know about PCI hardware IDs! :-)

It took a few goes, and in the end I managed to install XP using the VMWare UDA (Universal Deployment Appliance) with a RIS type installation source which included the Intel Mass Storage Drivers from the $OEM$ folder.

The SATA controller I had problems with was:

Intel (R) 82081G (ICH7 Family) Ultra ATA Storage Controller - 27DF

The Acer doesn't have a floppy drive, so it was the only reliable way I could deliver the drivers for the Text portion of the setup.

I'm not sure if anyone else has had this problem, but I thought I'd mention it as it drove me mad. The first boot would hang at Mup.sys and then blue screen with the 0x0000007b error. This seemed a little strange as it obviously had the drivers to copy the setup files etc...

At first I thought the HWIDs for this controller were wrong, but it seems that this driver isn't included in the Driver Pack. However, the driver for the Intel (R) 82081GBM SATA AHCI Controller is.

Would you consider adding support for the 27DF controller?