The skinny...Acer Aspire 3680-2682 laptop. Most specs are here, but this one is slightly different in that it has a Celeron M 440 processor (1.86GHz) and Acer does not show this exact notebook. Anyway, it was brought to me by my nephew for a memory upgrade (512MB -> 2GB) and to replace a thoroughly dead Hitachi 80GB HDD. Swapped out the Hitachi for a new Toshiba 320GB drive, and popped in some new Crucial memory. Pop in a Windows Vista disk, and all looks well. Choose the language for install, and then things come to a halt. I get a window telling me that:
A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing. If you have a driver floppy, CD, DVD, USB drive...
Yadda yadda. Bottom line is that it wants ATAPI drivers for the EIDE controller on the controller hub.

A bit of digging, and I see that the laptop apparently uses the Intel 940GML chipset (I have no way of confirming this, just so we're clear on that). If so, this should mean the system has the Intel 82801GBM (ICH7-M) Controller Hub. Info here: http://www.intel.com/Products/Notebook/Chipsets/940GML/940GML-overview.htm

Again, unless I want to rip the computer to pieces (which sounds like a great idea right now), I can't confirm this info either. Regardless, I have downloaded from every driver link at Intel which refers to this chipset, and the Visa op-system loader simply tells me that 'No new drivers can be found at this location' or something similar when I point the installer to the downloaded files on a USB thumbdrive (which the loader is reading fine, just so there's no confusion. It just doesn't like the files and says they're not what it's looking for).

I've never run into anything quite as frustrating in an op-system install. Any ideas?

Thanks for reading, whether you can help or not...