AHCI : Enable in Windows 7 / Vista

Hi Bare Foot Kid, thanks for the tutorial, I have it all down and ready to carry out.

I chickened out in the beginning and in the end I decided to do the Vista 64bit install on standard BIOS settings just to make sure I had a nice clean install of my OS and all my software, configured and updated that I know I could fall back on. With the sort of luck I have with computers I needed this fall-back; believe me! I've now made an Acronis image and backed it up onto an external and am considering the option of activating AHCI in the Registry then BIOS.

I know this is a Windows 7 Forum but the result should be the same for Vista 64-bit, besides my nephew, who has the same Crucial SSD does run W7 Ultimate, and he wants to know as well.

I have a query to all the W7F users who have tried this.
I am wondering if I will have a great enough improvement in performance by enabling AHCI given my system (if you can see my specs) to make it worthwhile. Or are there other, more subtle improvements to gain my enabling it?

Any comments on this? Especially from those who have done this already?

Any answer would be welcomed and greatly appreciated.

Fejinwales said:

Hi ICit2lol..

G'day mate. OK then, I shall set it to ACHI and do my damnedest to get it working. The reason I was concerned about the SSD failure was that quite a few people had failures with the OCZ drives, a firmware issue apparently when Windows shuts down and tells it to sleep, it stayed asleep and that was that. My nephew suffered this with one of their drives. This is why I could a Crucial as they - seemingly - do not have this issue. But I have shitty luck and if something's gonna go wrong it'll go wrong for me.

I'd love to visit OZ, some of my friends have moved out there, some in Surfers paradise - Gold Coast, one in Rathmines N.S.W, another in Melbourne.

Anyway, thanks for the advice, I am off then to do battle.

Glad you got it sorted I knew you would get pointed in the right direction.
Um yeah mate you would probably feel right at home at the moment - wet as all hell! LOL!!

Got to do battle myself tomorrow with an SSD into a laptop

Hiyya BFT my tester machine which has an Intel DG43NB board has the capabilities of running ACHI, EUFI, and 32 or 64bit functions.

Now I have just installed an SSD to it and BIOS has it currently is running 32bit & IDE now my small query is that I also have an 80GB HDD that was the original HDD and install if I change the IDE to ACHI am I going to have problems with the older HDD?

Alternatively I have another 64bit OEM would you recommend me installing that after cleaning up both drives and then changing the 32bit to 64bit in the BIOS and the IDE to ACHI? Will I be gaining much in performance?

I only ask as the HDD is a fairly old 2005 Seagate (3Gbs SATA) as I don't want to do anything to wreck this really nice (and given to me free) board / machine which is currently booting faster than my Sandy Bridge build with an SSD and ACHI! Or I can just get another newer HDD if that is what you say would be better. Cost is not really an issue but all the same I would rather just keep the small HDD.

Hello lilmoja,

If you already had AHCI enabled in the BIOS when you installed Windows 7, then there would be no need to. However, yes you can do this tutorial anytime after installing Windows if needed. :)

Well I did the tutorial but didn't get the messages but it has load the ACHI but the boot is much longer now with a black screen before the OS cuts in - have I done something wrong?