AHCI seems to have been raided by W7 Build 7068 on P6T

Salutations - first post - great site.

Background - bios set to AHCI and memory set to XMP profile (no overclocking by me).

W7 performance rating/skating scores:
Processor 7.4, Ram 7.8, Aero 5.9, Gaming 6.5
Primary Disk Transfer 5.9

Transfer rate between the 2 Seagates is 36mb's per sec. Transfer from Western Digital 'alien' 3rd disk 12mb's per sec.

Installed 7068 from sata dvd - no request for drivers! :sarc: all my 'old XP 32 bit' programs working perfectly, internet and home network to old XP system working too. Great change!

The problem(s)

1 Cannot hot swap other drives ie add 3rd or 4th drives live and remove live. I have to power down/ reboot to add/remove these drives.

2 Cannot remove the second Seagate at all! bsod. It was connected (new/unformatted) at the beginning of W7 install process.

This is a beta/test system so not worried about losing data/settings - just want to install W7 optimally for the gear I have (no games but may play with CS4/Gimp/Blender/CUDA/C#/F# at trivial level.)

Put simply does anyone on the forum have a clear set up sequence for clean install W7 64 bit/P6T Deluxe V2 - can either be IDE/AHCI/RAID 0 (2 disks) but must allow hot swap/removal of other drives and improve the performance rating for disk drives. HDTune thread puts me to shame.

By all means PM me if you do not want to contaminate the thread with motherboard specific info.

Draft Signature
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Just trying to dis-ambiguate the stimulii.

MikeQ: Welcome to the forum MikeA. Did you Build the system then put 2 blank unformatted sata drives in your shiny new case?

MikeA: Yes, set memory to XMP and SATA to AHCI

MikeQ: You probably mixed up the sata ports for drive 0 and drive 1. So Windows put the BootManager on what you thought was the blank second drive.

MikeA: I'll power the system down and check by removing what I think is the blank drive. Yup your right when I rebooted it said bootmgr missing!

MikeQ Ok - now boot with the 7068 x64 ISO - it will allow you the option to repair. Try it now. Did it work?

MikeA Yup

MikeQ Now see if your other drives including what you thought was the blank drive can hot swap.

MikeA: Yup I just put in an alien "Maxtor" message came up saying checking drive - now ready to use. Then message driver software installed successfully. Clicked on Eurythmics - There Must Be an Angel played with VLC no problem. Hot exited it too - no problem!

MikeQ Now the 'evil' drive - the one concealing the original Bootmanager - try that one.

MikeA Yup - copying files to it now at 34 mbs per second (about the same speed as before)

MikeQ Now TEMPORARILY view system and hidden files - what do you see on the second, non-system, drive?

MikeA bootmgr modified 22 March 2009, 375kb then BOOTSEK.BAK 5 April 2009, 8kb

MikeQ Told you. Other experts can tell you what to do about removing these files.

MikeA Thanks at least I have hot swap/plug for the rest of my drives - but would still like the disks to go faster.

MikeQ Pleasure - you can give points if it helps - I will not be offended.

LOL. I love it. Thanks for posting the info. Glad you got it figured out. I'd probably just try renaming those files, might have to http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/1911-take-ownership-shortcut.html, but I can't be sure it won't cause any problems, so maybe someone else can verify or debunk. If it causes no problems then just delete or format or whatever.

Gary