ICH9 AHCI problems

[hotpurple]

Hi Guys (and girls?),

I'm having a problem with a gigabyte G33 based board which has an ICH9 southbridge. When I turn on AHCI mode the PC won't boot (I also can't install vista with it turned on). I've tried several fixes including a registry fix from the microsoft website, which mentioned something about stop errors and another post telling me how to extract the drivers from the installed package and then reboot. The thing is, I can't even get past the bootloader when I turn AHCI on. I just get a message that says file not found, press any key to enter command line.

What am I doing wrong? Can anyone shed any light on this?

Thanks

Chris

[HSK]

Hey, i'm having near enough the same problem as you. i made a thread aswell.

my board is a GA-P35C-DS3R

i tried the registry tweak, it did get me in to vista, but it was freezing every other second. the drivers installed (after ages), the machine didn't power down properly (just got stuck in the shutting down screen). and when i started it up again, it just got stuck in the vista boot screen. i had to turn of ahci from the bios for it to boot normally again.

I havn't tried re-installing vista with ahci on in the bios - i wonder if it will even work that way now.

i wonder if any one has any idea on these probs :-(

[Phil_P]

See this thread, don't know if it will help:

HOWTO: enable AHCI mode after installing Windows - PC Perspective Forums

[hotpurple]

Thanks for that but I have already tried that solution unfortunately. The prolem appears to be quite unique in that the PC can't even get past the bootloader, it is as if the bootloader cannot understand the data on the hard drive and cannot find the boot files for Vista, either that or the drive letter (or whatever the equivalent is in the vista bootloader) gets changed when you turn AHCI on. I did try to do a fresh install with AHCI turned on, but the install hangs on completing installation, right about when it should reboot.

Chris

[hotpurple]

Has anyone got any further ideas on this problem?

Cheers

Chris

[aceuk]

Did you load the correct Intel AHCI driver when Vista prompted you when you last re-installed Windows (as shown in Figure 3 here)? If not, that's what you need to do. Without this, Windows can't 'see' the files on your hard drive and thus can't boot.

[Agent]

The prolem appears to be quite unique in that the PC can't even get past the bootloader, it is as if the bootloader cannot understand the data on the hard drive and cannot find the boot files for Vista, either that or the drive letter (or whatever the equivalent is in the vista bootloader) gets changed when you turn AHCI on. I did try to do a fresh install with AHCI turned on, but the install hangs on completing installation, right about when it should reboot.

Chris

Not accusing anyone of this, but if it is a pirated copy of Vista with 'Vista Loader' pre-installed you'll get this issue on some systems.

[hotpurple]

Cheers,

It is a legal version, Vista Home Premium x64.

Chris