I have a Toshiba Satellite laptop that I just had to put a new hard drive in. I want to load Windows XP Professional on it but I can't seem to find the SATA ACHI driver anywhere for this model.
Have you tried loading XP? Quite often the BIOS will present an SATA drive as an IDE to Windows Setup, and it will install fine. If it does want a driver you are going to have a problem anyway, because I imagine that laptop does not have a floppy drive?
I got Windows XP loaded by changing SATA in the bios from ACHI to Compatibility Mode. I would like to change it back to ACHI but it blue screens because I don't have the SATA drivers loaded. Is is necessary to change it back to ACHI or will it be ok leaving it in Compatibility Mode?
It will be OK leaving it in compatibility mode. You lose some of the advanced features of the later SATA drives, such as Native Command Queuing, but you are unlikely to notice much real-world difference. It would be easier to leave it as it is, because the big problem with loading drivers in XP is it's insistence on only loading from a floppy and nothing else. There is a way round that, but it is extremely hard work.
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