Enabling AHCI?

Question

Hello,

I am trying to determine which option to set in the XPS 420 A04 BIOS to enable AHCI for SATA drives. I use two drives, a 160GB and 320GB and obviously do not use RAID. The only options I see are under the "Drives" section in the BIOS, then under there I see "SATA Operation". My choices from here are "RAID Autodetect / ATA" and "RAID On". Any ideas anyone?

Thanks,

Adrian.

packerFan07 · Answer

dave5 is correct. I had to do follow these steps... You can try simply setting raid on, but if you get BSOD or endless loop of restarts, you will need to update the controller drivers as in the link....

dave51_2fe887 · Answer

Default should be 'Raid On' to have AHCI, running Vista and most XP setups, even if you are not using Raid Array. If Windows boots ok and it is set to either setting do not change it, Windows will Blue srceen on start up.

aln688 · Answer

Thanks for the help. I did try the both options in the BIOS, "RAID Autodetect / ATA" and "RAID On", but this article threw me off and made me think I wasn't setting something correctly:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

...especially the part where it states whether the driver is running or not, msahci:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci

Each time I installed Vista from fresh and without installing anything afterwards (not even drivers), the Startup key was set to 4, not a 0, indicating it was not starting up and being loaded for AHCI.

Maybe I need to install the Windows Intel Matrix Storage Manager after installing Vista to get it to use the msahci.sys driver?

Thanks again,

Adrian.

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Enabling AHCI?

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