AHCI : Enable in Windows 7 / Vista

SJMaye said:

No Cigar. Same thing.

I went back in to regedit and the MSAHCI was still set on 0. Just in case I set it back to 3 and rebooted.

Once in Windows 7 again I went back to regedit and set MSAHCI back to 0 again. Exited and rebooted making sure to catch it this time and go directly to the bios. I set SATA mode to AHCI saved and exited. Rebooted and got the same result. This time I did notice in those DOS-type screens it did mention AHCI. Attached are the screenshots of my HTPC so you can see exactly what I am seeing.

Not sure it matters, but this morning I was looking into my HDD to see if that was the problem. I did note there is a jumper on this drive that keeps it in SATA mode. If removed it goes to SATA II mode. Not sure why I did that seeing at the mobo does support SATA II.

As I was reading your last post, the first thought that came to mind was "flash your BIOS with a later ervision", but looking at the product info page (ASRock > Products > P55 Pro; this is your board right?), I see this in the list of connectors:

- 6 x SATAII 3.0 Gb/s connectors, support RAID (RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10, RAID 5 and Intel® Matrix Storage), NCQ, AHCI and Hot Plug functions

So I highly doubt that would be an issue....

Other than that, I can't say I've tried running a drive with AHCI mode while it's restricted to SATA 1.5G/s speeds... If your drive has that jumper, I'd suggest taking it off regardless.

On that line of thought though, perhaps restricting the drive to SATA-I instead of SATA-II might be causing an issue? I can't say for sure though, and my Windows 7 PC is at home (I'm at work) so I can't test on mine to see if it is an issue.

By the way, what drives do you actually have connected at the moment? I'm not sure what you use, but I like using Speccy to get information on PC hardware.

Orry about that. The ASRock is on my desktop. The computer we are talking about ehre is my HTPC. The motherboard is a Gigabyte MA-965P-DS3 rev 3.3. The SATA sockets on the motherboard are SATA II. Or at least they are labeled that way and the documentation states they are SATA II.

I will try removing the jumper and see what we have.

Jumper gone. Reboot with AHCI enabled. Same thing.

I did notcie something however, I doubt there is any relationship between PCI Devices Listing an this issue. I noticed when I put it back to IDE mode and it was booting fine it went through the PCI Devices Listing. There were no additional devices listed. Same devices same amount as when trying to boot in the AHCI mode. That was the bottom of the list just before it asks if you want to boot from DVD press any key.

So it seems the hang up is something about that.

BTW- Anyway to check in Win7 whether that drive is now running in SATAII mode?

SJMaye said:

Orry about that. The ASRock is on my desktop. The computer we are talking about ehre is my HTPC.

Ah, ok.. I did see you mention an HTPC, but I must admit I was a bit confused.. However:

SJMaye said:

Jumper gone. Reboot with AHCI enabled. Same thing.

That really sucks...

SJMaye said:

I did notcie something however, I doubt there is any relationship between PCI Devices Listing an this issue. I noticed when I put it back to IDE mode and it was booting fine it went through the PCI Devices Listing. There were no additional devices listed. Same devices same amount as when trying to boot in the AHCI mode. That was the bottom of the list just before it asks if you want to boot from DVD press any key.

So it seems the hang up is something about that.

Just to confirm, is Windows 7 booting off a SATA drive? Do you have any IDE drives in your HTPC?


Edit: Another point to keep in mind, and I don't think it's been mentioned here yet... When you switch from one mode to another (IDE / SATA / AHCI / RAID) you will need to check your drive boot settings; I'm not saying it's definitely the problem, but is it not maybe something like your motherboard trying to boot off a drive other than the one with Windows 7 on it? Sometimes the simple things get overlooked...

The HTPC is pretty simple. Currently only 1 HDD and 1 DVD drive. Both are SATA. Once I have this working I have a second driver to add for dedicated HTPC recording space.

Everlong said:

Spidey1976 said:

Not sure now... I did a boot just to see BIOS options and couldn't find anything for AHCI - there is a section to enable RAID. There is a chipset download on ASUS's website for "Make NVIDIA SATA RAID driver disk" and there is also an ATK0110 driver (whatever that is).

Don't know if anyone else has done this with the same board or chipset:

ASUS M2N-SLI (BIOS rev 1003) w/ nVidia nForce 560 (nForce 4 MCP65) chipset

The only BIOS updates since 1003 are betas and it just makes me nervous beta testing a mobo

You'll need to refer to my second post here https://www.sevenforums.com/711504-post1.html. That's the closest you can get to doing this with nForce motherboards unfortunatley.

Thanks for the heads up - I'll give it a shot soon

Everything worked as laid out in the tutorial (except that only 2 were nVidia - the 3rd was already standard IDE) - no change noticed - WEI score stayed at 5.9 - at least it worked without problems

Thanks all!!