AHCI : Enable in Windows 7 / Vista

Great news. :)

Just registered to say thanks for this tutorial. Wasn't aware that NCQ depended on controller mode until today.

Been trying to get my 2 TB Seagate 7200.14 to act normally (folks, don't buy Seagate 7200.14 or 7200.15 drives, they're garbage), and was hoping maybe turning on the NCQ would help somewhat with the performance drain that drive has on the system. Haven't had a chance to find out if it helps yet, but my boot drive is a WD Black which was built for NCQ operation, so either way I want NCQ on.

For those unaware: The problem with the Seagate 7200.14 (aka Barracuda V) and 7200.15 drives is the firmware. It's written to discourage using them in RAID setups, so it fakes death by sending fake HALT commands to the controller now and then, which causes all kinds of problems. Seagate won't admit to this behaviour, but command logs show the proof. I've flashed the drive's firmware, which has resulted in the drive merely stalling the system when it has to go through a hard reset, instead of before where it would lock up and disappear from the system, causing all kinds of wonderful errors.
If your drive controller is not RAID capable you supposedly won't have any issues whatsoever with these drives. If, however, your controller IS RAID capable (which most high performance computers are), then the controller will go into a panic whenever the drive sends those fake death notices. Only solution is to not use those drives with RAID-capable controllers (whether running RAID or not), but sadly I can't afford to replace it with a nice WD yet, since 2 TB drives are still a tad expensive.

EDIT: Had a driver crash (buffer overflow) which led to more "fun" Windows stupidity, which led to me reinstalling... now Windows flat out refuses to use the correct SATA driver, and as far as I can tell, refuses to even run in AHCI mode. Redid the registry as before, deleted the device in device manager, rebooted. I still get "AMD SATA controller" and "Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE controller". Attempting to force update the driver fails, Windows insists it's using the right one.

EDIT 2: Switched the BIOS back to "IDE", which gave me 3 dual channel controllers in device manager and 6 ATA channels listed. Then rebooted and switched to "AHCI" once again. Now I'm back to having it listed as "Standard Dual Channel" and only 2 ATA channels are listed. I still have access to all my drives, but it's still stuck on the MS drivers, and seems no matter how many times I reinstall the AMD driver it will not use it. Wtf gives with that? Makes no sense.

EDIT 3: Appears I had forgotten to install the E-SATA driver. Now I've got AMD SATA controller under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, and JMicron under Storage controllers. No other drive controllers listed. For some reason I can't find the E-sata in the BIOS to disable it. Everything else is listed but that.

Hello Bibhu, and welcome to Seven Forums.

That would be correct. You would need to do steps 1 to 6 in the tutorial in both Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 first, then restart to BIOS to finish. :)