AHCI --> IDE in Vista

DeaconFrost

DeaconFrost

[H]F Junkie
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Sep 6, 2007
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I know that if you set up Vista using your SATA controllers in IDE mode, and then change to AHCI in the BIOS, you'll be greeted with a BSoD.

What if I were to do the reverse? What if I set the system up using AHCI, and wanted to switch my BIOS settings back to IDE mode. Would that boot okay?
 
Going back to IDE should be fine. It requires only generic storage drivers.

RAID and AHCI require 3rd party drivers. Don't yell at me if I'm wrong here though. :)
 
Yeah, should be no problem going back down to IDE - in fact that's a good recommendation before you swap out motherboards (if you don't plan to re-install).
 
I've done this twice and encountered the same BSOD as going the other way. On Vista, most of the drivers for RAID, AHCI, and IDE are already on your system, but you must make sure they are set up to load BEFORE you try this.
 
Hm... I don't think IDE->AHCI will necessarily blue screen Vista. On my P5E when I switched my DVD drive to AHCI mode vista just discovered the AHCI controller, the drive attached to it, installed the drivers and then carried on like business as usual.
 
Hypernova said:
Hm... I don't think IDE->AHCI will necessarily blue screen Vista. On my P5E when I switched my DVD drive to AHCI mode
Click to expand...
Since he is talking about booting, I think it is safe to assume he is talking about HDD issues not DVD drives. :rolleyes:
 
Well, I tried it this morning and BSoD'd. I'm assuming the drivers are there because Intel IDE drivers are built in to the OS, plus I had the Intel Chipset drivers loaded already. Looks like I'm going to be waiting until my next build.
 
That link is for going from IDE to AHCI. I was attempting to go the opposite direction from AHCI to IDE.
 
I went from IDE to ACHI when I last reinstalled Vista no problem. When I discovered that my HDD was in MultiWord Mode 2 and my CD drive seemed to be stuck in PIO 4, I switched back to IDE in the BIOS and rebooted no problems at all. Drives went back to UDMA mode, and I didn't need to change any registry settings.
 
Well mine got locked in a reboot loop when I tried to go from regular SATA to AHCI, so the advice in this thread was very helpful. Many thanks.
 
Believe me, you would not want to go back to IDE from AHCI if you have a drive that properly implements NCQ (as opposed to one that advertises NCQ). So far, only Seagate 7200.11s properly work.

NCQ, when properly implemented on the drive, works wonders. Now you can multitask and no longer need to wait 3 mins for a program to load while you are doing a zip or virus scan at the background. I have a thread on this in storagereview along with applicable testing method.

It does not BSOD on me. And it should not BSOD on you either if you haven't slipstreamed your OS media and removed Microsoft storage controllers.
 
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