This is similar to this question, but for AMD (or general for all hardware, if such solution exists).
Windows 7 is installed with a SATA controller in AHCI mode. Afterwards, I added two more hard drives to be used as a RAID pair.
This led to the known catch-22:
- If I enable RAID mode in BIOS, Windows won't boot due to a missing RAID driver.
- If I boot still in AHCI mode, Windows won't let the RAID driver be installed, since there is no RAID controller present.
How can I force Windows to install a driver, when the corresponding hardware is not present?
In my case, the driver is a simple pack of INF, SYS and CAT files.
Best Answer
OK, as said , I solved the problem. As I did several tries, I can not be sure what steps are necessary and what not, so I'll list everything I did.
First, the situation:
Then:
try to boot Windows, it fails (it reboots during startup, no error message is visible)
I set controller mode back to AHCI
Now the trick (part one):
before:
after:
then in Device Manager I selected to Update the driver of the IDE controller, "let me select the driver", Have disk... and select the above INF file and then the driver.
reboot, set RAID controller mode to RAID in BIOS
The trick (part two):
(after it worked, I went to Device Manage again and set the driver for IDE controller back to the correct one: Update driver, select automatically...)
* the 1002/4392 is the PCI id of the RAID controller when set to RAID mode. It is listed in the mentioned INF file. You can also try to look it up on this web site. The most reliable info is to set the controler to RAID mode, boot some OS (Linux comes in small handy formats) and check the PCI id there. In linux the lspci command shows this info.