This was a nightmare, I spent a day and a half on it and dell's support was useless. Here is what I did and this was the ONLY combination of things that would work:

you must install the 82801HEM/HBM ICH8M Driver For SATA in order to activate AHCI

I was able to do this by installing windows with the bios set to STANDARD ATA

then I updated the driver for the 3 port ICH8M driver to the 82801HEM/HBM driver

after reboot I changed back to AHCI and it worked fine.

do not update the single port standard SATA controller or you won't be able to boot

Avoid staying with the standard SATA mode, it is much slower than the AHCI, much slower than I had thought it would be.

Message Edited by pmarcus on 06-20-2007 11:36 PM

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@mombodog wrote:

I know that, I was curious which one was used.

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I used the Dell Drivers

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@mombodog wrote:

Thanks for the heads up. This info will be very helpful to others in the future.

Where did you get the drivers? Dell site?

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You can download the Matrix SATA storage drivers from Dell's support site, or from intel.