Windows 7 - ITE IT8212 Driver Windows 7 Solution

After searching the Internet for Windows 7 (or even Vista) drivers with no success to access the GIGARAID ITE IT8212 ATA IDE/RAID on my Gigabyte 8I945G Pro, I realized that I had successfully installed the Win 7 RC onto these drives so I knew it could be done. But all I could find were XP drivers for this older motherboard.

Short Answer: The key to this is installing the XP drivers (either 32 or 64 bit) during the initial install from floppy or USB flash drive (these can be downloaded from the Gigabyte website) and installing Windows 7 onto one of the ATA drives, then copying the partition to a SATA drive.

Failed Attempts:
I first tried just a normal install to dual boot XP and Windows 7, but with no Windows 7 driver, none of the drives on the Gigaraid were accessable.

I successfully installed my Vista Ultimate, and tried to upgrade, but it wouldn't let me since I didn't have Windows 7 Ultimate. Like many, I tried Vista and went back to XP. I love Win 7 now, but I have really old software that won't run on it.

Full Story:
I have several SATA II drives (C,D,E,F) plus two IDE drives (G,H) on this system. C: was my Windows XP system; D:,E: & F: are data only drives; and I had installed Windows 7 RC 32 on the G: and Windows 7 RC 64 on the H:. After playing around with both versions, I decided that the performance increase with the 64 didn't offset all the software issues and since my machine only supported 4GB of memory, the 32bit version of Win 7 was the way to go. On the final successful install, I booted up my Win 7 install CD, and when it only showed me the SATA drives, I inserted the USB flash drive with the XP drivers, loaded the XP drivers from there, and did a refresh to install Win 7 on the second G: drive partition. After rebooting and getting it to run correctly, I booted Win7RC on H: and ran Acronis to copy the good Windows 7 install partition from G: to the second partition on C:. I already had all the BCD entries on C: from my failed installations to dual boot XP and Win 7, but I still had to use the install CD to repair the boot entries. After that, everything worked and I can see all 6 hard drives from Windows 7.

I'm posting this only to possibly help others from a day of frustration - I suspect that this method may work on other older machines that have drives with no Windows 7 drivers available.