Windows 7: ACHI driver issue W7x64

Greetings all

I'm making a post as a W7x64 install is driving me nuts.

During Windows 7 setup, at the F6 prompt, I've loaded the drivers for the Southbridge to enable SATA hotswapping and NCQ'ability.

When I set the BIOS to ACHI mode the Windows 7 installation fails to complete, during the first reboot within setup Windows 7 will report a hardware fault and refuses to reboot.

When I set the BIOS to IDE mode the installation goes fine, but there's no sign of hotswap or NCQ onboard.

All my SATA drives are in SATA-II mode (Barracudas, 1x 80Gb boot, 2x 1Tb archivage, 1x 500Gb misc') so this isn't the cause, and they're all connected to the orange/yellow main bank of six SATA ports (there is nothing attached to the purple Gigabyte chipped twin headers).

I've already swapped out all the SATA cables and chkdsk'd the drives, and verified the integrity of the Windows 7 DVD.

My board had the original BIOS when I checked, so I upgraded to version F6. Alas nothing has changed.

Other components are a Palit HD4850 Sonic graphics card, 8Gb OCZ 1,333Mhz RAM, plus a modest Intel Q9300 2.5Ghz CPU.

If anyone has experience of loading the Southbridge ICH10 drivers under Windows 7 and can spare me an explanation I'd be very grateful...

Have you considered upgrading to the beta BIOS?

Welcome to windows 7 Qdos, take a rep for the system spec you posted.
In regards to your hard drive set up. You have your 4 hard drives connect as SATA. Are you planning to use them in redundancy? AKA RAID
I see from your post you are planning hot swaps?
We have seen considerable difficulty with users using AHCI connections in storage configurations.
I suggest trying to switch the drive settings to SATA and the storage configuration to IDE.

Regards,
Adrian

Thanks for the replies, but SATA hotswap and NCQ are desirable because my work often necessitates backing up data to external drives (eSATA) on the fly - and I don't want to have to reboot to do that.

Additionally the NCQ feature can improve the fetch/write performance by a considerable margin on non-RAIDed drives.

Thank you, but it's a fairly modest system, albeit I hope futureproof for a couple of years...

Nope, just need hotswap and NCQ to work, I'm leaving RAID to my NAS backup solution (for safety, as opposed to speed).

Whatever I set in the BIOS I'm stuck in legacy 'IDE' mode without getting the ACHI drivers to work...

Qdos, have you updates the motherboard's BIOS?

What Intel ICH storage drivers are you using?

He's at F6, the latest version. There is a beta version available. See my above post.

Yup, F6 is the latest stable BIOS. I don't want to use a BETA and I doubt this is a BIOS issue either as there are loads of others having similar issues on differing motherboards.

The SATA/ACHI Southbridge driver I'm using is the one which can be found here:-

GIGABYTE - Support&Download - Motherboard - Driver - GA-EP45T-UD3R (rev. 1.0)

GIGABYTE SATA2 Driver
Download from :
Asia Asia(China) America Europe Europe(Russia) : ftp / http 1.17.50.02

If I read your manual correctly, your model doesn't use the Gigabyte SATA driver, it uses the Intel driver (page 95, note 1). I think you should be going to the Intel site and downloading the Intel Matrix Storage Manager.

Yep, Intel Q9300Processor
Good catch kegster!