SATA emulation from IDE to AHCI?

FriendlyFire

I’m having a bit of a bugger issue right now. I’ve bought a flashy new eSATA drive which packs a huge punch over USB2.0, but now I realize the motherboard was configured to automatically put SATA HDDs as IDE for compatibility issues. Of course, this streamlines installation of Windows and such, but now I need to actually go into the hardware panel and manually refresh Plug-n-Play devices for the eSATA drive to appear. AHCI’s advantage is that it is supposed to allow SATA hot-plugging, which would fix this issue.

However, I really don’t want to format all over again, as I did that about 3 weeks ago for the third time in a bit more than a month. I’ve looked around on the net and found a few “solutions”, but none of them worked. Whenever I switch the BIOS from IDE to AHCI, Windows bluescreens about half a second after the splash screen appears and restarts. At least I can go back into the BIOS and change it back, but it won’t let me boot in AHCI mode.

Do you guys have any idea on what could be a working fix for this without reinstalling Windows all over?

Schmackbolzen

Well, i have my SATA drive running in AHCI mode and even if I change the mode in the BIOS to IDE emulation Windows uses AHCI mode, so I guess the SATA driver overrides the settings. Maybe you should try to update your SATA driver and if this does not work maybe a BIOS update will do it. There also could be trouble between the eSata connection and your SATA controller, since SATA 2.0 specification states that support for eSATA has to be present but many manufacturares write something like (compatible to xxxx standard up to 1m cable length). You could try to look up the specs for your controller, maybe you find a hint there.

FR

…… the 2 cent of one, who experienced a SATA on-board RAID stuff
smashing 2 hard drives, the 2nd on “rebuild RAID”:

Be very careful with the on-board SATA RAID blabla-everything controllers and
keep in mind, that a SATA controller might easily be more expensive
than your mainboard.

Maybe you just experience a mainboard / controller fault.
And playing around with that might not make you 2 happy.