Clean install - SATA to ATA fix

After running a clean install of vista on my laptop with the installation disc, the screen would show the black screen of death (black screen & white cursor) after the last step of installation.
After researching the matter I found that the correct drivers were not installed. So I changed SATA to ATA in BIOS and reinstalled Vista. This worked and I was able to install the Intel matrix storage manager driver from my drivers & utilities disc. After this I restarted and tried to switch ATA back to SATA. But now Vista will not load in SATA; it runs in a loop that flashes blue for a second and then tries to re-boot. When I change it back to ATA, it boots fine.
How do I fix this?!

 

Also the laptop is a dell inspiron (if that matters...)

 

Okay, others have been in your shoes before, and talked about it on the Internet! In particular, rather than try to
summarize the wisdom of others, I'll refer you to a discussion at Toms Hardware: http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-1829320/bios-detact-sata-drive-ide.html.

The smart folks at Toms won't totally solve your problem, but at least they'll discuss it interestingly. (I'll make a
guess -- very likely wrong -- that your system sees your hard drive as an ATA device because it has a
Master Boot Record at the start and no more than 4 partitions, just like computer hard drives in the distant
past when ATA and IDE were practically interchangeable terms. This is just the sort of hard disk setup that
Vista expects, so it shouldn't be too troubling.

I.e., Vista can't naturally cope with modern day UEFI/GPT disk interfaces. How does one install Vista on
a UEFI system? you many wonder. Well, set the hard drive up to mimic am ATA system, using a MBR
and no more than four partitions, and a UEFI BIOS will let your computer pretend to be an ATA machine,
so Vista -- or MS DOS -- will play happily with it.)

YOUR problem however is that of a day or so ago, one cannot casually do another reinstallation of Vista
since the handy supply of Microsoft updates just ended a day or so ago. There is a stock of them -- just
about a thousand of them -- at the Windows Update Catalog (Google will point the way to you), but the
pile doesn't quite include all the hotfixes and that have piled up over the years. I suggest you BACKUP
YOUR CURRENT SUSTEM BEFORE DOING ANYTHING ELSE. And keep that backup on some other
drive so you have something to fall back on if worse comes to worst.

Then you can begin experimenting ....

Or not. If your system is actually working properly in all other respects, need you worry?

Note that I speak with some experience. I decided to freshen up my Vista system with a full clean
installation on Monday, and got up to 135 system updates when MS pulled the plug at 2 AM on
Tuesday morning ... Still putting pieces of software back together myself.

Let me know how things are coming with yours.