ACHI driver issue W7x64

[Qdos]

Greetings all

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

During W7 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 W7 installation fails to complete, during the first reboot within setup W7 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 W7 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 W7 and can spare me an explanation I'd be very grateful...

 

[kegobeer]

Have you considered upgrading to the beta BIOS?

 

[Adrian]

Greetings all

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

During W7 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 W7 installation fails to complete, during the first reboot within setup W7 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 W7 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 W7 and can spare me an explanation I'd be very grateful...

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

 

[Qdos]

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.

Welcome to windows 7 Qdos, take a rep for the system spec you posted.

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

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

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

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.

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

 

[Adrian]

BIOS

Qdos, have you updates the motherboard's BIOS?

 

[kegobeer]

What Intel ICH storage drivers are you using?

 

[kegobeer]

Qdos, have you updates the motherboard's BIOS?

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

 

[Qdos]

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

 

[kegobeer]

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.

 

[Adrian]

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!

 

[Qdos]

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.

I'll certainly have a look at that, but the USB stick does ask me to select the Intel ICH10R driver at the point of tapping F6 during setup, with the download from Gigabyte unzipped to the thumbdrive - however, as mentioned originally - this fails to produce a satisfactory installation.

The board I have has two different SATA controllers, so Gigabyte bundle them both in their software. One of the controllers is the Intel ICH10R on the Southbridge (six SATA channels) and the other is a Gigabyte chip that controls two further SATA channels.

I've got my C,D,E & F internal drives on the Southbridge controller, plus a bridge to a backplate with two eSATA ports for external drives (the DVD is on an IDE ribbon, the Gigabyte SATA controller is not in use.)

 

[kegobeer]

Intel might have a newer driver available that could stop the crashing. Since the Gigabyte controller isn't in use, it shouldn't be causing any crashes during the install process.

 

[Qdos]

I've just checked the Intel Matrix Drivers for Windows 7, and the installer says they're incompatible with my hardware.

Intel do not specifically list AHCI/RAID drivers for W7 and the ICH10R chipset, and in various forums there are all sorts of proposals regards there being no drivers out there yet (which - if it's true, is disgusting on the part of both Gigabyte and Intel).

Next I think I'll try shifting my boot drive to the Gigabyte SATA headers and see if that solves the AHCI issue regards NCQ on the primary partition, however even if that works it doesn't address the NCQ/AHCI issues for my onboard archivage drives

I do have a 1xPCiE SybaWeb dual SATA RAID card kicking around too, but am not sure if there are any 64x W7 drivers written for that either...

The whole situation is very unsatisfactory, I bought the motherboard and RAM specifically to have a system which could hotswap slave SATA drives and run NCQ on fixed volumes pseudo permanently...

 

[kegobeer]

Which version of the Intel Storage Manager did you download? Did you download the F6 64 bit floppy config utility?

 

[Qdos]

There are some serious issues with the latest Intel Matrix Software...

See this thread...

http://communities.intel.com/thread/5036?start=0&tstart=0

Digging around with Google and following numerous other forum posts led me to the following page... where there's a handy (in fact miraculous might be a better word...) utility for forcing the RAID chipset drivers into place after Windows 7 has already been loaded

RAIDFix | The Dr's Office

I've not done this myself yet, however there are various testimonials to it being a success and fixing this issue in Windows 7.

 

[kegobeer]

Wow. What a pain in the but 8.9 turned out to be, huh? Hopefully you can find 8.8 around and try using it, and hopefully RAIDFix works for you.

 

[Qdos]

So much for all of Steve Ballmers bull$41t regards Microsoft working hard with third party dev's to ensure Windows 7 would be fully supported by the time it was made a public retail release, eh?

When I have nothing else to do I'll use Raidfix and try the v8.8.0.1009 Matrix Storage software (developed for Vista, not W7...) or otherwise wait for Intel to pull their socks up I guess...

 

[kegobeer]

Give the 8.8 floppy drivers a shot - hopefully it'll work for you.

 

[nredding]

The Win7 install DVD can handle AHCI hard drives without the need to load drivers using F6 (as could Vista).

Why not just do the iniital install using the Windows AHCI driver? You can always install an improved driver later, if necessary.

 

[Qdos]

What W7 says it can do, and actually manages, seem to be two different matters - hence countless posts, like mine, littering forums left, right, and centre across the web.

I did F6 and install the AHCI drivers initially. Both the Intel and Gigabyte chipset drivers.

Fact was I still could not (and cannot) enable AHCI in the BIOS, even having done so!

The drivers are designed for Vista, not W7.

Intels forums are cluttered with grumbles (see earlier link).

There are no updated W7 drivers on Gigabytes DL site, nor do the ones on Intels site work.

Microsofts claims that W7 is properly supported by 3rd party software devs simply isn't true - although I've every confidence updates will be made available, at some point.

The inability of the hardware (all of it recently purchased) to work with W7 speaks volumes for Microsofts hollow claims