(No, not that BART, or that Bart. I mean this Bart)
The option for installation of mass storage drivers in WinXP seems to be completely borken. I had to install it on a box with a SCSI controller that is not recognised by the installation CD. I created a driver diskette, dutifully hit F6 and was glad to see that installer could see the SCSI drive and create and format a partition. It installed the base OS and then refused to copy the driver from the floppy. I tried umpteen variations of the driver in multiple directories in plain and CABified form and it would have none of it. I also tried the F8 options. Nada. Out of curiousity I borrowed an IDE drive, installed WinXP to it and then added the driver from the floppy without a hitch (not a viable option as the box has to boot from a SCSI disk). The Knuisance Base acknowledges that the F6 option is frowned upon and basically tells you to go away and stop being a freedom-loving wussy.
Anyway, I copied the installation CD tree and added the driver much as described here (there are similar descriptions elsewhere) and then burnt the CD with Bart's bcd. Now the installation could proceed without the F6 and diskette silliness. Or so I thought. Although it could see and format the SCSI drive it couldn't copy the driver it had used from the CD. Mercifully this time it accepted the one on the diskette. No, I had no access to a Linux box at this time or cdrtools etc. would have sufficed just nicely. GAR!
Hardware lock-in? Of course not.