Quick Question

[The PIT]

Just upgraded my main machine and thats gone fine.

However when I upgraded it the SATA was set to be configured to IDE rather than AHCI which enables advanced SATA features.

Now if I change the setting XP can't find the hardrives as it hasn't got the drivers installed.

Is it worth changing or just leave it.

To change it would I presume I need to set the drive controller back to a standard driver again or do another sysprep.

[The PIT]

No one ???

[Evildead666]

I think its better with AHCI but i had to disable it and just use EHCI, or IDE Compatible.
The drivers should already be in windows if youve installed the forceware driver no ?
In the .inf file or something ?

I'll just have a look, i'm running a raptor 76Gb...back in a mo

[Evildead666]

Nope, dont have AHCI or EHCI in the NF3 bios, must be in the Intel Machine in the corridor...
Got the Pentium 805 D to 3.7GHz stable, but with e 36Gb raptor in a slow mode..that was necessary for 4.1, but just too unstable. will just have a look to see what its set at.

[Evildead666]

Nope, dont seem to have it on the i955x board either, must have been on the EPoX.
I have changed for the dual core board..

Cant help you there then, sorry.

[The PIT]

Oops just realised I hadn't updated my sig.

It's an Intel setup now.

Theres another solution install a cheap sata card transfer the hard drives across check it boots and then change the bios settings and let XP find the new controller.


Quite a few posts say Sysprep doesn't work by default which is surprising.

[The PIT]

Bought a cheap sata card. Plugged the master drive into that and let it load the drivers. problem solved.

[Evildead666]

This might be of help to smoeone, and would have helped you probably, if i had gotten the two 250Gb SATA2 drives earlier.

I DID have AHCI on my i955X board, i was just looking in the rong place, and i was in Standard-IDE mode, for stability, with my SATA Raptor 36Gb.
This is all on the 4 SATA2 ports given by the ICHR7 on the mobo.

I added my two SATA2 250Gb drives, and already had the one Raptor 36Gb (Boot drive).
I then set up the stripe for the two 250Gb drives, and all seemed well.

Reboot, starts loading windows, blue screen, reboot.

Check on the web, and find that if you use the RAID setup on the ICHR7 chipset, you cant have a single drive on any of the free ports, you can only have the RAID setup.
Luckily i had bought an Adaptec 1210 SATA RAID card, mistakenly, and decided to use that to boot from.
reboot, same again.

Decide to do a *long* repair of Windows. Its not the recovery console one, but the one a few screens after, where it redetects the drivers and such.
I inserted the correct floppy driver (once i found a floppy drive and a floppy) it all seemed to go swimmingly, reboot, same again.

Grrrrr....

Boot into safemode, install all the RAID drivers needed, format the 465.76Gb RAID Drive (Looooooong) in 64K clusters.

-> When i created the RAID in the ICHR7 setup page, it said it was creating it with 128K clusters (i think), well it said 128K something anyways...but i couldn't find ANYWHERE in the config/setup pages to Format the RAID Array...I have it on the Adaptec controller setup pages, but not in the ICHR7 RAID setup pages, only seems possible in WIndows.

Basically, the *long* repair process takes about 45mins, and requires you to re-insert your Windows-Key. All the hardware is redetected, and reinstalled, but it keeps ALL of the Windows Programs files, and everything.

I changed my motherboard at work, after a failure, and went SiS to Intel, in 45mins!!!
Everything was back to normal, great.

Changing to RAID tho, seems to have more problems...

Still formattting......50% in about 15-25mins....

[Evildead666]

Had a baaaad problem with drivers, and couldn't get it fixed.
Reinstalled Windows from scratch, and alls fine.

Pretty fast too

Took over an hour to format fully.

First encoding try crapped out at 353Gb, and left an unusable 156Gb file...

Tried RAW, but 200Gb for 10mins didn't seem sound...

Anyhow, the problem was finally solved by reinstalling Windows.
No surprises there...