SATA/AHCI Mode

[Crankley]

I have a 2-month old Dell 8400 (P4 3.0, 250 G WD hard drive). The hard drive failed after 6 weeks. I got a replacement with a factory-install of Windows. The tech told me that I had to switch the BIOS from "Raid Autodetect/AHCI" to "Raid Autodetect/SATA" or the "unpacking" of the OS on first boot would't find the drive. This made sense to me because earlier when Windows had corrupted, when I booted to the Windows CD to attempt a repair install, the system couldn't find a hard drive until I switched to SATA.

After finishing the install, I attempted to switch back to AHCI mode, which is the factory default. On boot up, I got a BSOD indicating that there wasn't something right about the disk. Reboot / switch back to SATA, everything's fine.

I am tempted to just leave it running in SATA and forget about AHCI mode. I had read somewhere that on a home system AHCI isn't going to give me any particular performance advantages (NCQ), and at least I'll be able to run a repair install if I need to.

One remaining thing troubles me. After installing the new drive, I checked System Event Viewer, with which I became very familiar while trying to figure out the source of my earlier system woes (it wasn't immediately evident that the problem was the hard drive), and there is a "System Error" on boot up "EVENT_BOOT_SYSTEM_DRIVERS_FAILED" with further text "The following boot-start or system-start driver(s) failed to load: iaStor". I know that iaStor.sys is the Intel AHCI driver. The system seems to run fine and I wouldn't even known about the "error" had I not known about Event Viewer. I don't understand why it would try to load since I'm not in AHCI mode. Iastor.sys is in I386 and Windows\System32\Drivers.

My question is this: If I just leave this system in SATA and forget about AHCI, is this something that could come back and bite me in the butt later on?

I believe that if I switch to AHCI mode and perform a Dell factory restore of the OS (wipes out everything and sets it back to state that customer gets it from Dell), I could freely switch from AHCI to SATA. I have no other way of installing the AHCI drivers because a floppy drive was an option that I didn't get. I haven't got any data on the computer and although I have got networking going and Windows SP 2 installed, etc., it wouldn't take me that long to redo all that, so if I need to go through that this is the time.

Thanks for any insights you may have on this.

[SovereignScorn]

Ah, good old WD... I think 6 weeks is a long life for a western digital... Should have gone maxtor... Anyway, I say run it in SATA mode, and make a new windows xp cd instead of using your dell restore disk. The dell restore disks have all your drives on them, but theyre also packed with spyware.

[Crankley]

Problem above solved: I found a way to enable AHCI mode without doing a factory-reinstall of the OS and without a floppy. This is the gist of it, although you may want to read some of the replies for clarification. Bottom line, don't allow Windows to search for the driver, and you need to find the driver information file IAHCI.INF (this is for AHCI and NOT RAID). For Dell owners, its on the ResourceCD, and it was also on my HD in the DRIVERS folder:

WARNING: This went smoothly for me, but I don't think it's without risks. Obviously, if you mistakenly install an incompatible driver, you could render the drive unbootable and be forced to reinstall the OS. I was at a point where I was going to do that anyway if this didn't work.

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1) go into bios and select 'RAID/ATA' option

2) install xp [not necessary if already installed]

3) boot into xp

4) go to device manager and update the ide controller that's connected to

SATA drive. make sure you force it to select

'Intel® 82801FR SATA AHCI Controller'

*note- u can get the driver from dell CD or u can download R78496.exe

from dell, but in this case, u'll need a PC with floppy to extract

the image unless u have winimage, but i'm not sure if it's gonna

extract it for u. *forget to mention that u still need to be able

to access those driver either by lan, cd/dvd reader, hardrive to

hardrive,etc....

5) make sure you don't update the driver for PATA IDE. if you do that,

you won't be able to boot back into windows regardless of which mode u

choose in bios for ide controller.

6) after u update the driver for the IDE attached to your SATA drive, windows

will ask you to reboot.

7) once reboot, go into bios before windows start and change 'RAID/ATA' to

'RAID/AHCI'

8) save and exit bios, now you should be able to boot into windows and install

intel application accelerator.

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This is part of an extended discussion of SATA drives in RAID and AHCI configurations and the problems with reinstalling the OS if you don't have a floppy drive. By the way, if you're looking to buy a new system, I definitely recommend getting the floppy drive, and I would have if I known that I was going to face these kinds of issues, but Dell (and Gateway-you can't even get an internal one on some systems), by making the stupid things optional, seems to be suggesting that it's obsolete technology that we can do without. Here's the link:

Dell forum discussion ACHI/SATA/RAID

[Crankley]

Ah, good old WD... I think 6 weeks is a long life for a western digital... Should have gone maxtor...

This is the second Dell system I've lost a WD hard drive on. The first one was out of warranty but it worked as a slave for a while -- long enough to get my digital photos and stuff off it. Learned a lesson about backing up.

On the other hand, my daughter just inherited my 8-year old Gateway P166 with 2.1 and a 8.4GB WDs (the 8.4 is only 5 or 6 years old) and they're going strong.

I wonder if any manufacturer is immune from this. I tried to get a sense of relative failure rates on Google and found a lot of people that think Maxtor's are very unreliable. It comes down to what you experience, I guess. I thought this quote was right on they money: [No matter the manufacturer,] "either you get a good drive that will perform well and last a good long time or you get a piece of crap that's doomed from day one."

[SovereignScorn]

I dont know, I've had WDS out of the box, and Maxtors out of the box... WDS all crashed, Maxtors have all be running for about 3 years each now...