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Problems when switching BIOS settings to AHCI; two of my drives vanish
Win7-64 Home Premium SP1
mobo: Gigabyte EX58-UD3R (latest possible Firmware)
hard drives:
* physical 1: 500GB WD AAKS, for C: and D:
* physical 2: 1 TB WD, split into two partitions
* physical 3: 500GB WD, drive G: ... for storage
* physical 4: 500GB WD AAKS: drive K: for steam/games
* physical 5: 3 TB WD green, in an external dock (Thermaltake BlacX)
* (soon: Crucial M500 240GB SSD)
I have a new 240 GB SSD on order, and I've been reading that I need to enable AHCI in the BIOS to get the most out of it - if not to get it to work at all (my buddy said his wouldn't work until AHCI was enabled)
So I did the registry edit MS published that lets you enable AHCI on an existing windows installation. Then I go to the BIOS, and changed two settings to AHCI. Here are the screens of my BIOS, and what I see:
imgur: the simple image sharer
One entry is "ICH SATA control mode", and the other is "Onboard SATA/IDE control mode"
Both have options to change to AHCI. I have no idea why there are two different ones, or what either means. I changed both. I rebooted and the PC goes through an AHCI search function during the boot. It gets to windows and windows goes through a lengthy process of installing drivers, which seemed to be successful, but the problem is that when I now go into Device Mgr, I get errors on two of my ATA channels under "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" -- I get exclamation points by two of the ATA channels. And sure enough, two of my physical drives have vanished from Windows Explorer -- always physical drives 3 and 4 (drives G: and K:)
When I get the SSD, is it best just to install Windows clean? I'd prefer to clone my existing C: to it, but if I install clean - should that resolve the AHCI issue? Or is there something I can do now to resolve it? or should I just forget about AHCI, and go back to IDE in the BIOS?
Thanks a bunch for reading this and for any help.