Using an SSD on a MBR Bios

A friend has a 4 or 5 year old custom built machine with an AMD MBR BIOS with no facility to set the SATA Mode to AHCI. He migrated his HDD Win 7 to an SSD using Intel's migration utility and it booted perfectly. However after about 4 or five boots the BIOS doesn't recognize the SSD and of course wont boot. Unplugging the machine from the wall and power on again usually restores the bootability. (Is that a word?) He is about to update the BIOS.

I wonder, since it seems conventional wisdom says you should set the SATA Mode to AHCI, if the lack of AHCI could be the problem?

Thank you.

Can you tell the Model of the SSD?

But try to put it in AHCI and see if that fixes it.

whs said:

Nah, that's not the problem. SSDs run perfectly well in IDE mode. There is something else wrong with his BIOS. Maybe a new CMOS battery would help.

I think you are probably right about the BIOS. Maybe when he flashes it the problem will go away.
I never thought about a low CMOS battery. That is worth a try.

Thank you.

jsquareg said:

A friend has a 4 or 5 year old custom built machine with an AMD MBR BIOS with no facility to set the SATA Mode to AHCI. He migrated his HDD Win 7 to an SSD using Intel's migration utility and it booted perfectly. However after about 4 or five boots the BIOS doesn't recognize the SSD and of course wont boot. Unplugging the machine from the wall and power on again usually restores the bootability. (Is that a word?) He is about to update the BIOS.

I wonder, since it seems conventional wisdom says you should set the SATA Mode to AHCI, if the lack of AHCI could be the problem?

Thank you.

Here is some further, peculiar information about the problem.

We just noticed that if a Win 7 System DVD is in the cd/dvd drive the bios sees the SDD every time. Remove the System DVD and the machine reverts to the not seeing the SSD. Go figure! I've never run across this before in my limited experience.

Anyone have a possible explanation for what is going on?

Thanks again.

I dont know, but my guess is that if you have it in while this is occuring maybe it detects the SSD as a system reserved drive and wont regonize it.