AHCI mode on old drives

[CorrupT88]

AHCI SSD without formatting drives?

I installed my SSD on IDE mode by mistake... I cant change it SHCI... I tried the various fixes online etc... Anyway I have given up on that and will jsut change it when I format the SSD....

The question is when I format my SSD and re install it on SHCI mode what about my 2 mechanical 500gb WD hard drives? I cant format them ebcause they have things I want / need to keep on them but how will they work without formatting them if the controller is running in AHCI mode?

[Hazard]

AHCI SSD without formatting drives?

I installed my SSD on IDE mode by mistake... I cant change it SHCI... I tried the various fixes online etc... Anyway I have given up on that and will jsut change it when I format the SSD....

The question is when I format my SSD and re install it on SHCI mode what about my 2 mechanical 500gb WD hard drives? I cant format them ebcause they have things I want / need to keep on them but how will they work without formatting them if the controller is running in AHCI mode?

Your 2 500GB HDDs will be fine in ahci mode and will work in the same way as they do in ide mode, perhaps better. Its windows that can't handle the switch between ahci and ide mode, not your SSD.

Your ok to go ahead and reinstall windows on your SSD without fear of loosing your backup data on your HDDs (as long as you don't accidentally format your HDDs before you reinstall windows )

[cookiehead2]

If you haven't already reformatted your drive you might try the registry tweak in this thread: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/25...-64bit-install

It worked for me when I needed to go from AHCI to RAID mode in my BIOS. It may also work for going from IDE mode to AHCI.

This post is old, but I had a similar experience recently. I found a great link which provided the info below. Works great on Vista, Win 7, Windows 2008 Server (tested), and likely Windows 2003 Server. Saved me a TON of time, all other solutions I found were NO WAY near as simple as this.

Go into the registry using regedit and change each of the "start" values in the registry keys below from 3 to 0 and this will allow you to change between the different modes by just changing the option in your bios each time you reboot.


HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\servic es\pciide

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\servic es\msahci

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\servic es\iaStorV

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\servic es\iaStor


You might not have the last registry key (iastor) as this is installed in the registry with the intel raid drivers, the default windows 7 raid driver uses the iastorV key.

[app]

What does AHCI actually do? I dont really notice any performance difference when it's enabled.

[dracom_ma]

What does AHCI actually do? I dont really notice any performance difference when it's enabled.

It does a few things.

It allows for hotswapping of drives which is important if you use esata ports, it also has NCQ, which doesn't really benefit SSD's


Supposedly it needs less CPU overhead and handles large drives better.