Asus Formula I – Fix AHCI/Crucial SSD Boot Issue

ahcifreezessd

I have an Asus Formula I, the BIOS version is the latest 1402. I have 2 CD-drives and 2 regular drives attached to the SATA ports.

Now I've bought the Crucial CT256M4SD1 and want to use it as boot drive but there is a bunch of issues with that:

When I switch the board from legacy to AHCI the system gets stuck when it tries to detect the drives. Same as here (not my photo but same board and issue) enter image description here

I have to unplug all drives except the CD and SSD then, reboot, change to IDE, plug the old drives in and it will boot again. I figured out that my 1tb WD hard drive seems to cause that issue. But when I try to boot without it im getting stuck at the point where the system should boot from the CD drive or the hard drive. But instead it just gets stuck and shows a cursor.

I have already disabled the Jmicron RAID controller on board. I am not using the RAID controller and never did before.

So, how can I get the system booting with all drives I have but using AHCI and booting into the systems bootloader? I've already wasted hours on that.

Edit:

So far I figured out that this happens very likely because the BIOS or Controller is for some reason not able to read my partition table properly and the BIOS hangs because of this when detecting the drive. But I have no Idea how to fix that without deleting the partition table and reformat the whole drive. I do not want to do that, I would have to buy another drive before to backup what is on this drive.

Edit2:

Look at this thread, this is an excerpt from it:

the problem is in disk geometry detection in AHCI mode. for example:

get empty disk. check didk geometry with system info. you will see Tracks/Cylinder = 255, Sectors/Track = 63. Create 100MB NTFS partition
with Windows Disk Manager. Reboot. Check disk geometry – it changes!

Why disk geometry changed? because BIOS thinked that partition end is aligned to end of cylinder. So it uses END CHS value for first
partition and LBA END for counting new geometry. In my case I saw the
following

record in master boot record. END CHS = DF 13 0C (END HEAD = 0xDF)
Disk Geometry Tracks/Cylinder chaged after reboot from 255 to 224. 224
= 0xE0 = 0xDF + 1

As you can see DISK GEOMETRY IS DETERMINED BY END CHS VALUE FOR 1ST
PARTITON

Now imaging the following you again get empty disk with geometry 255/63. Create partition with size 101MB or 352MB or 705MB or there
are pretty much other sizes. These sizes are specific – after creating
partition with this size you will get ZERO in end chs for 1st
partition. Reboot now – and you will see that bios hangs – cause disk
must have positive Tracks/Cylinder.

How to fix this?
-DO NOT USE AHCI or -use large 1st partitions more than 8GB (end chs for such partition always FE FF FF).

I've already resized the partition to take more than 8gb but it does not work. The follow up post in the thread on technet verifies that too. So to what it comes down is that I have to fix my disk geometry to a flavor that the BIOS will like or get a 2nd disk of the same size and temporary copy my data to another drive, reformat and copy it back. I really would like to avoid that time consuming process.

Best Answer

If you still have the CD and SSD plugged in when you reach the frozen bios screen, and you say that this is very likely because the BIOS cannot find the partition table on the SSD. That would imply that if you had a CD in the disk drive, it would proceed to boot off of that.. Correct? You would need to have your boot priority set to CD first of course.

If this is indeed true, I would offer the suggestion of getting a USB-header to USB-port adapter (such as this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812200294) and then plug a flash drive into that inside your case. Then install a boot-loader such as GRUB to that flash drive which would naturally detect the OS you are trying to boot from on the SSD, this would then chainload into that OS's bootloader and you will have a happily running system.

This is of course a last-case scenario, but as being I don't have all of your comp parts sitting on my desk, it is tough to troubleshoot more. I am using this sort of setup personally, (except exnay the flash drive and using an OLD 4 GB IDE drive). This is because I could not for the life of me get my computer to boot from a RAID-5 setup, unless the bootloader was else-where.

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AHCI Causes BIOS to Hang on POST – How to Fix

What you might try to do is to force windows to use the entire hard drive as a single partition. You could then both avoid the small system drive as well as attempt to eliminate the small pockets of space. This requires a reinstall of windows. The problem with Win7 is that it splits up system files onto both partitions. The 100MB partition can't be deleted (source).

Whenever you do hard drive experimentation, it is best to get a spare hard drive to do all of your work on. This protects your system from accidentally killing the OS and gives you a fall back in the event your experiment fails. You mentioned that you are looking to get a SSD. You could wait to experiment until you get this drive.

I have found two methods to get this to work.

Method 1: Use the GUI interface to re-size the automatically generated partition.

When you partition a drive, windows will automatically create the 100MB partition. What you do once this happens is delete all partitions except this 100MB one. You then extend the 100MB partition to fill the drive. (source)

Method 2: Interrupt the installer and partition the disk in the command line

At the first setup screen (Language, Keyboard, etc.) press SHIFT+F10. This will open a command prompt window. You then enter the following commands in order:

diskpart
list disk
select disk 0
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=ntfs quick
exit
exit

Note: When you use the list disk command, your disk number may be different than disk 0. Change the "select disk" command as needed.

Note: You will have to type exit twice. One to close diskpart, and another to close the command prompt.

Once you return to the GUI, continue with the install. When you get to the partition screen, highlight the partition you just created and click Next. Windows will install to the partition you created and not create the 100MB boot partition. Instead, you will see a C:\Boot folder when the install is finished (like Vista has). (source)

There isn't much you can do when you have a buggy BIOS or chip set. Just because the hardware states that it supports an option, doesn't necessarily mean that the option will work.

Hope this helps

Windows – RAID vs AHCI on Windows7 x64 ASUS

You can RAID drives independent of the BIOS setting using utilities like Linux's MD RAID or Window's Dynamic Disks. Windows likely wasn't booting when you moved from AHCI to RAID because that is translated to Windows as a hardware change, which it does not typically play well with.

Setting RAID mode in the BIOS really only will enable a boot-time RAID setup utility which is provided by the motherboard manufacturer. If one is not supplied, then setting it to RAID more will realistically have no effect.

Best Answer

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Windows – RAID vs AHCI on Windows7 x64 ASUS

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