In order to dual-boot XP and Vista on my dell laptop that came with Vista, I had to change the SATA identification mode in the BIOS from AHCI to IDE. Otherwise, the XP setup would fail, because it wouldn't recognize a hard drive.

If I had installed XP properly to the new partition, I would have kept the HDD in AHCI and booted the drivers in from a floppy or thumb drive. However, because the XP setup would recognize the HDD and run properly if I configured the BIOS to set the SATA drive to IDE, I did that instead.

The problem is that Vista won't boot if the HDD is in IDE mode... if I want to boot into XP, I have to set the BIOS SATA mode to IDE, and if I want Vista, I have to set it to AHCI.

Is it possible to install the SATA drivers to XP without reinstalling the OS so that I can boot into both of my OS's without having to tinker with the BIOS beforehand?

Thanks.