I got an Acer Laptop  Aspire 5315-2153 which came with Vista Home and one internal SATA hard drive. Tried to boot from a BartPE to image the internal HD to an external USB hard disk.

After booting, BartPE did not see the internal hard drive at all but saw the USB drive. Wondered what trick MS was playing to keep users meddling with the operating system!!!

Finally I figured out that the MB is accessing the internal SATA drive in AHCI mode, which is new to me. So I needed to create BartPE with AHCI drivers (available from Intel website)  slipstreamed to the Windows XP or add the drivers at boot time. Here is a nice review of the AHCI issue.

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/10/23/windows-xp-setup-could-not-detect-and-f...

Thought might help someone who may face the same problem.

Rama

NightOwl wrote on Nov 8^th, 2007 at 10:54pm:


I was able to set the BIOS to non-AHCI and then the BartPE without the AHCI drivers was able to see the hard drive. However, since the mfr installed the Vista with AHCI mode, when Vista was started in non AHCI mode, it hung and gave a msg that it is unable to start and referred me to the mfr for a fix. When I changed back to AHCI, it booted ok with Vista.

Rama