Good luck for later. The drivers in that folder have AHCI in their names so they may install.
Because Windows XP was designed to provide the F6 option for non-embedded drivers, it was not encumbent upon hardware manufacturers to do anything other than provide a means of installing drivers by this mechanism, so you may not be correct in your assertion...
there must be a fix for this problem
It is not even encumbent upon anyone to work out what a possible solution/workaround might be.
I have researched manual installation of drivers and I found these...
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itproinstall/thread/a7f77561-9fda-4cc5-ad45-edaf77484ae7
http://reboot.pro/index.php?showtopic=11729
...though at a glance I suspect that at least parts of one may have been cribbed from the other.
Another possibility would be to slipstream a Windows installation CD using, for example, nLite, with AHCI drivers (and maybe SP3 too if the original CD was pre SP3), then use this CD to do a repair installation of Windows. Never having done this I am unsure
it will do the job, but maybe someone else watching/viewing this might know.
I'm out of ideas now.
Tricky
Thanks again, Tricky!
I will be trying these tips out later! There seems to be some very interesting ones there! Yes, a slipstreamed CD probably is in order anyway. XP was installed from my Win XP SP2 CD
Regards,
Kelly