AHCI : Enable in Windows 7 / Vista

The manual for the board itself will show what options are present. Generally you don't go into the bios setup and see a separate AHCI tab. You have to get familiar with the layout and hard drive options and go in further to find out just where that option if present is located.

Here I have the feeling the board saw that or another default drive setting enabled since the initial clean install of 7 when new wouldn't load up! When going back into the bios setup and switching over to the Native ide mode 7 then loaded right up until just lately changing to AHCI where 7 automatically adjusted to it.

Still the best place for bios settings would be in the user manual or support site's documentation for that make and model board. That's what you will need to go by anyways.

Night Hawk said:

The manual for the board itself will show what options are present. Generally you don't go into the bios setup and see a separate AHCI tab. You have to get familiar with the layout and hard drive options and go in further to find out just where that option if present is located.

Here I have the feeling the board saw that or another default drive setting enabled since the initial clean install of 7 when new wouldn't load up! When going back into the bios setup and switching over to the Native ide mode 7 then loaded right up until just lately changing to AHCI where 7 automatically adjusted to it.

Still the best place for bios settings would be in the user manual or support site's documentation for that make and model board. That's what you will need to go by anyways.

Nightawk is right also if you have Bios and support downloads for that board and they support achi and raid drivers then your board does

I have a AM2+ board that has achi but the settings are hidden not every board makes them easy to see

Just take a fast look at the Dell documentation pages I posted back in Post #468 to how well hidden that for the other system. That still didn't name AHCI or ide but simply indicated one sub section for sata settings. Buried deep is probably how to describe that one.

This is one reason I prefer to read through the manual that comes with any new board first off to know just what I will be running into for anything. Gettting to know your way through the bios with a manual to reflect back on will be a great help.

Well at least for a ful atx model board at least over the micro atx mb in a new mini tower case here I'm working on. The only thing outlined for sata was best seeing a matching pair and then going into creating an array which is the 3rd drive mode option on most newer boards. The main board however sees 6 Sata II and another pair of Sata III ports where there are also more options to find in the larger bios version used.

OvenMaster said:

Night Hawk said:

The software I run here of course goes along with the tv tuner/capture card where I was running into burn to disk problems until sticking an old cd burner in and whamo it worked. The same for the newly clean install of 7 set for the Native ide and automatically configuring itself well when switching to AHCI.

The part about seeing a continuous HD led busy all the time shows you may have a program glitch to tend with since it is taking up the cpu time as well as wanting to write to the drive but unable to. It usually turns out to be some problem with the present install of a program rather then the mode the drives are run in or the type of drive you have.

Are you basically saying, then, that I should uninstall the program in my present IDE mode, make the necessary Registry and BIOS adjustments, and after rebooting, reinstall and test my program? Just confirming.

I doubt switching back from AHCI to ide has anything to do with the problems you are running into with it. You had mentioned the HD led being left busy all the time which indicates the program was still trying to write to the drive but could not finish the task.

Generally the two main causes are hardware like I found here was 1) hardware where two working dvd burners no longer would work or 2) a software problem where a good clean reinstall of the program may simply clear things up provided nothing else is interfering.

Looking at anything new added on recently which is now cause for concern if everything with the program itself is still working as it should could explain a few things. A new program seeing a startup service running in the background causing problems for you.

The last item to consider would be a background service found to be disabled or set for manual while a program needs it set to automatic. A look at the FAQs section at the software company's support site might point out which service to look at when seeing problems as part of the troubleshooting process.

Glad to hear that went well for you! It's always hard to say if a fresh install will be the solution in every circumstance however. Here it was simply using a totally different optical drive for the video editing program rather then a fresh install that saw working results while the first drives are still working well as always.

As far as the read and write times on each of the Sata II OS drive here I wouldn't be able to say I noticed any difference overall. The access times for the other pair of Sata III drives would remain the same anyways since Windows didn't see them reinstalled as SCSI devices.

While the changeover was simply automatic in 7 I wouldn't advise anyone to try this without first planning a clean install of the next Windows version to come however! The simple change didn't go so well for the Windows 8 Release Preview install on the second OS drive however. That would now need another clean install to see if 8 will run on it's own without a separate driver disk.

Glad to hear you were able to solve it that fast! DCMKC Welcome to SF by the way!

The problem I had when first getting this case together with a fresh install of 7 was the board was shipped with it set to AHCI. Apparently not already having Windows installed with all drivers and updates was why when switching to the Native ide setting 7 then loaded up normally.

With the recent clean install seen to all the board, chipset, sata and ide controllers drivers were already inplace to see 7 simply mount and install the two OS drives with a prompt to restart. It then added in the other pair of storage drives still left in ide mode however being Sata III not II models.

Just done an install on a Toshy laptop and get to the mrxsmb / mrxsmb10 / mrxsmb20 and they open into "Enum"

Below those entries there is a folder / entry msahci that also opens to "Enum" but go back and I have a load of entries that include one that is titled
"ImagePath" that has "REG+EXPAND_SZ" then "system32\drivers\msahci.sys"

Now I am little confused as to which of the entries I should be looking at - I haven't looked in the BIOS yet for any refs to AHCI so perhaps this machine (2008) is too old to use AHCI?