Tried this somewhere else but I guess it's more appropriate here.

Trying to install Darwin 8.0.1 on a T4210 with standard GMA945 ICH7Rev 2 Sata controller.

8.0.1 is too old to support the controller it seems, and there doesn't appear to be a newer apple-built Darwin. Can anybody point me to a Darwin with decent SATA support? Or does such a thing not yet exist.

I have Windows TBPC and Slackware 11 partitions both functional so can dd diskimages etc. . .

im not too familiar with darwin but there is a few versions newer available than 8.0.1 which is very old and i doubt that there was ich7 support for it, you can get the source code for all of the versions here not sure where to find built versions but i hope that is helpful

EDIT: just realised that there is a binary link on that page for the 8.0 version of Darwin, is that the one you downloaded??, you could try compiling some of the newer ones that might give you better results....