Using Linux to install Windows XP on a Vista Notebook

Bright and early this morning some guys came into our shop with a newish notebook (Dual-Core 1.8GHz, 160GB SATA hard drive) with a major problem: they'd killed Vista and their rescue partition. They came armed with a legitimate Windows XP Home CD and key but said they weren't able to get XP on the notebook. It seemed odd, so we looked into it a bit further and discovered that the problem was a "driver issue." Basically Windows XP Home (2002) doesn't support SATA out of the box. It's possible to press F6 and load a driver from a floppy, but the notebook didn't have a floppy, it was too new! So we tried dumping the driver to a USB key and to a SDCARD, neither of which were supported as a device that the Windows XP setup could recognize. At this point we got into a discussion about using a Live CD, QEMU and setting up Windows through Linux... but it seemed a bit complicated and we were pressed for time, so simple solution: Install Ubuntu 7.10, VirtualBox, then Windows XP. After Ubuntu finished installing the customer asked if it supported his wireless chipset... sure enough it did... We installed VirtualBox and then Windows XP Home. Problem solved. Inelegant, but it worked and the customer went away happy and a bit more interested in Linux (he asked for the Ubuntu install CD).