I just built a PC for the first time. My Gigabyte motherboard notifies me after the POST that I have SATA drives operating in "IDE MODE". It asks me if I want to switch to AHCI mode to allow hot swapping. What's the difference?
SATA Drives: Difference Between IDE Mode and AHCI – Explained
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This sounds like a BIOS error -- the BIOS isn't finding the right drive to boot from when in AHCI mode. I do not believe you're dealing with an OS issue.
Try stripping the system down to bare minimums.
Plug in only one bootable hard drive (the HDD or SSD, whichever contains the OS system partition) and no optical drives and try booting.
Plug in only one optical drive and no harddrives and try booting. If it doesn't work, disconnect and try the other optical drive.
Plug in only one bootable hard drive and one optical drive. You should be able to boot to the hard drive and the DVD.
When trying to boot from a single device, make sure you try all SATA ports on the motherboard before giving up.
If you can boot in those situations, your problem is the ports you've connected your drives to -- try rearranging them so they connect to different ports, to force the BIOS to enumerate them in the correct order.
If you can boot to the optical drive but not the hard drive, you may have a broken bootloader (eg, if the bootloader is installed to the non-system drive's MBR but not the system drive's MBR). You should be able to fix this from the Win-7 repair console.
If none of those work, make sure you have the latest BIOS firmware and try again. You may need to try resetting the BIOS to defaults and reselecting AHCI mode.
I found this, it is for Home Server but this OS is based on 2003
Ok, I saw another post (on a different forum) on how to change from ATA to AHCI and I thought I would share. I finally got it it to work yesterday, after many blue screens ( cause I didn't know exactly which driver to choose)
My setup is a poweredge T110. I did the initial install in ATA mode. (For those who don't know, you can go the bios, and set the mode to be IDE, and enable all ports on the machine) This will ensure WHS installs fine.
Once the server installation is complete you will begin the second step. This is changing the driver to the appropriate AHCI driver. You probably want to clone your current hardware profile, so you can go back to it if you blue screen. This is available in the System --> Hardware --> Hardware Profiles. Open device manager, right click on Standard Dual Controller or something similar It will be under the heading IDE/ATAPI controllers. Click install from specific location. Then click "don't search. I will chose the driver to install" The click have disk. Browse to the driver ( You'll need to get this from your manufacturer, in my case dell ) Choose the appropriate driver. In my case there were more than 10 choices, and I with alot of trial and error I found that the Poweredge T110 needs the "PCH SATA AHCI Controller" which is Intel's new Nehalem controller.
Once it is installed, I disabled the second controller (in AHCI mode you need only one driver, in ATA mode, you seem to get two ) It prompted me to reboot. Upon reboot, you need to go into the bios, and change from IDE mode to AHCI. Once the system loads, it will says mode change detected, data loss will occur. In fact, data loss will not occur, I don;t know why they post this warning ( try at your OWN risk though xD ) Type yes to continue (twice i my case as I have two disks ) and the server should boot fine. If you got the wrong driver and it blue screens, go to your saved config, or use F8 for last known good config.
Note that if you have a manufacturer specific ATA controller, you might need to change it back to the standard Microsoft controller before changing it to the AHCI controller. The Microsoft ATA controller allows you to reboot before install which is key.
Best Answer
AHCI, or Advanced Host Controller Interface, is a more featured way of exposing storage adapters to operating systems. It's fairly new as these things go, Win Vista being the first Windows release to have it out of the box, but is definitely the way of the future. Older operating systems, or those that simply lack the drivers, can't use ACHI-mode interfaces and require older parallel-IDE style interfaces to access storage. This is the reason why you always need to add drivers while installing Windows XP to motherboards with SATA boot-drives.
If you can use it, always use AHCI whenever possible.