New
#21
Nothing I've found suggests that there exists Win7 drivers for this Promise SATA378 controller.
Normally (and this has existed as an option forever) at install time there is something like a "press F6 to provide 3rd-party drivers" for hardware that is not supported directly out-of-the-box by the OS installer. This certainly existed for WinXP, and I had to use it for my Adaptec 39320 U320 PCI-x SCSI controller. WinXP came with built-in support for the Adaptec 29160 family U160 products, but not the x9320 family. So, I had the driver from Adaptec on a floppy diskette and pressed F6 early in the install, and then I was prompted for this (and possibly additional) driver diskettes at the right time during the early part of the install, after other files had been copied from the installation CD/DVD.
Since at the time all of my hard drives were SCSI, and connected to this 39320 controller, without the Adaptec-provided drivers available to WinXP's installer via F6 I could not install WinXP. Now Win7 was a different story, with Adaptec getting official 39320 drivers to Microsoft for inclusion on the Win7 installation DVD, so no F6 approach was needed.
But the same F6-like capability exists even today for Win7's install... but Microsoft's done a very good job of hugely expanding the number of hardware devices supported out-of-the-box directly. So the number of genuinely unsupported hardware devices which still require a manufacturer-provided driver and which are critical to Win7's install, at Win7 install time, is much smaller than it was with WinXP. There's no problem finishing the install with still-unsupported but non-critical devices, as you can hunt around and probably get drivers from the manufacturer's site to finish things up successfully... after Win7 gets installed.
In the case of this Promise SATA378 controller, this is a critical piece of required hardware for the Win7 installer to support, either through built-in drivers provided by Microsoft or from the manufacturer. The hard drives are connected to the controller, and without the controller's support there is no hard drive support. That's the reason the F6-for-drivers option exists.
However it appears this controller simply does NOT have Win7-compatible drivers to support it. They were not given to Microsoft several years ago for inclusion on the installation DVD (nor for Vista), and they do not appear to be available on any manufacturer's web site. And you cannot use WinXP drivers instead.
I think this hardware (meaning your laptop) is simply relegated to WinXP-only end-of-life status. You're going to have to replace it with "modern" hardware if you want to use Win7.