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XP in AHCI..possible?

P

Pain|Killer

n00b
Joined
Nov 8, 2007
Messages
24
I have using Windows Xp and have configured sata as IDE in bios. Now my question is..

Can i use/install Xp in AHCI mode. Whenever I config my sata as AHCI and try to load xp, I get BSOD and it restarts.

Secondly I wanna know, Is there any benefit shifting to AHCI from IDE?
 
You can, provided you load the proper drivers. However, if this is an already installed system, you may be looking at a running sysprep on it. If you really want/need AHCI, wait until your next fresh install. That being said, on a desktop PC, you aren't going to really notice a difference.
 
There is a method to change your system over to AHCI if the OS has already been installed when the SATA controller was not set to AHCI mode. I have done it once with XP, and it was successful, but shortly afterwards my motherboard died and was rendered unbootable. The two events are separate though.

Googling for it should produce results. AHCI gets you NCQ and hot swapping support. I still can't get a definitive answer for whether or not you need the hotplugging support to use eSATA, but on my current motherboard, I use AHCI on the controller dedicated to eSATA (the Jmicron one that controls the externally accessible ports on the mobo).
 
Thanks both of you. It isn't any problem for me to reinstall windows. The real problem for me is floppy disk, i don't have it. Is there any way to load drivers from usb stick or cd during windows installation.

I downloaded intel matrix storage manager now, but when i run it, it shows an error that my computer doesn't meet the minimum requirements. Actually my intention was to extract IMSM driver to usb.

Anyone can tell me the proper way?
 
Pain|Killer said:
Thanks both of you. It isn't any problem for me to reinstall windows. The real problem for me is floppy disk, i don't have it. Is there any way to load drivers from usb stick or cd during windows installation.

I downloaded intel matrix storage manager now, but when i run it, it shows an error that my computer doesn't meet the minimum requirements. Actually my intention was to extract IMSM driver to usb.

Anyone can tell me the proper way?
Click to expand...

If you want to reinstall, you can slipstream the drivers onto the Windows XP disc with nliteOS.

Vista supports loading drivers from a USB drive, though.

To do it with an already installed Windows XP:
http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=444831

That's the thread I followed on that fateful night my Gigabyte P965 DQ6 died. :p It did work successfully for me though.

And again, my motherboard died for another reason - BIOS flash interruption. :(
 
Pain|Killer said:
Thanks both of you. It isn't any problem for me to reinstall windows. The real problem for me is floppy disk, i don't have it. Is there any way to load drivers from usb stick or cd during windows installation.

I downloaded intel matrix storage manager now, but when i run it, it shows an error that my computer doesn't meet the minimum requirements. Actually my intention was to extract IMSM driver to usb.

Anyone can tell me the proper way?
Click to expand...

You can slip stream a driver into a windows cd and make a new cdr with the driver and windows files out it but your best bet is to just buy a floppy drive and use it for the install. I keep a usb floppy drive sitting around for this as I need to load raid drivers on servers all of the time.
 
BillLeeLee said:
If you want to reinstall, you can slipstream the drivers onto the Windows XP disc with nliteOS.

Vista supports loading drivers from a USB drive, though.

To do it with an already installed Windows XP:
http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=444831

That's the thread I followed on that fateful night my Gigabyte P965 DQ6 died. :p It did work successfully for me though.

And again, my motherboard died for another reason - BIOS flash interruption. :(
Click to expand...

I found that thread also and will try this install tonight. It's always good to make use of the latest useless features: NCQ and HD swapping. Apparently there is a bit of extra 'pop' to hd speed, but in the real world, NCQ is more beneficial in a server environment.

There is no way to recover the BIOS/board? Sounds like such a light way for a board to go...no zap, no smoke, no burning smell!
 
chrispycrunch said:
I found that thread also and will try this install tonight. It's always good to make use of the latest useless features: NCQ and HD swapping. Apparently there is a bit of extra 'pop' to hd speed, but in the real world, NCQ is more beneficial in a server environment.

There is no way to recover the BIOS/board? Sounds like such a light way for a board to go...no zap, no smoke, no burning smell!
Click to expand...

NCQ may or may not benefit you. It is mainly for systems with a lot of disk activity like multi user environments. The hot swapping is slightly useful, cause it might be necessary for eSATA, which I do use.

Anyway - replacing the BIOS chip was the way to save that mobo. The motherboard had a redundant BIOS, except to switch over to the BIOS the system had to actually power on. My motherboard would just go into a nonstop power on/off cycle.
 
BillLeeLee said:
NCQ may or may not benefit you. It is mainly for systems with a lot of disk activity like multi user environments. The hot swapping is slightly useful, cause it might be necessary for eSATA, which I do use.

Anyway - replacing the BIOS chip was the way to save that mobo. The motherboard had a redundant BIOS, except to switch over to the BIOS the system had to actually power on. My motherboard would just go into a nonstop power on/off cycle.
Click to expand...

Do you think that i should update to AHCI anyway? As long as I can still use an IDE/ATA drive as well. My DS3R comes with eSATA ports so eventually I will use that. What is hot swapping anyway? My goal is to have a system running the latest gimmick yet providing the most in stability.
 
chrispycrunch said:
Do you think that i should update to AHCI anyway? As long as I can still use an IDE/ATA drive as well. My DS3R comes with eSATA ports so eventually I will use that. What is hot swapping anyway? My goal is to have a system running the latest gimmick yet providing the most in stability.
Click to expand...

Hotswapping just means you can connect/remove something when the system is powered on. For example, USB is hotpluggable/hotswappable, but PS/2 is not (though people still do it, but I know a few people who have blown their PS/2 ports doing this).

SATA is hot swappable, which is great since it allows you to do eSATA.

Are your eSATA ports through another controller? If so you only have to enable AHCI on that and don't have to do the registry stuff to make it work.

I don't run in AHCI anymore though, once I added my hitachi 500 GB drive my system refused to boot with AHCI enabled.
 
BillLeeLee said:
Hotswapping just means you can connect/remove something when the system is powered on. For example, USB is hotpluggable/hotswappable, but PS/2 is not (though people still do it, but I know a few people who have blown their PS/2 ports doing this).

SATA is hot swappable, which is great since it allows you to do eSATA.

Are your eSATA ports through another controller? If so you only have to enable AHCI on that and don't have to do the registry stuff to make it work.

I don't run in AHCI anymore though, once I added my hitachi 500 GB drive my system refused to boot with AHCI enabled.
Click to expand...

I assume the eSATA ports are on the same controller: i am unable to boot with AHCI enabled in bios. I'll have to go to pcper.com to do that registry stuff to get things working.

Weird that your hitachi doesn't like AHCI. As surprised that drive wouldn't support it.
 
BillLeeLee said:
If you want to reinstall, you can slipstream the drivers onto the Windows XP disc with nliteOS.

Vista supports loading drivers from a USB drive, though.

To do it with an already installed Windows XP:
http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=444831

That's the thread I followed on that fateful night my Gigabyte P965 DQ6 died. :p It did work successfully for me though.

And again, my motherboard died for another reason - BIOS flash interruption. :(
Click to expand...

Extremely good link...thanks, I'll try it tonight and will let u know.
 
Indeed. I just installed it. My boot time is longer by 10 seconds (well...NCQ isn't much of a benefit so why not count the seconds!).

Installation was successful. At first i copied the driver in the wrong folder so i got BSOD :)

Be sure to read the whole thread. There is one thing to do afterwards:

"All this process worth nothing if you forget at the end to go to device manager, double klick your hard-drive(s) under "disk drivers", go to "policies" tab and mark "Enable write caching for this disk" (I recommend adding this to the guide)"
 
It worked for me too..woohoo..cool..:cool:

But i can't find any performance gain.:confused: What about you chrispycruch. Are u enjoying it? or switching back to IDE? ;)
 
It's possible but not worth it, Intel's AHCI drivers currently don't support write caching and you will have lower performance than legacy. I have tried in both Vista and XP x64 with the latest Intel Storage Matrix (it contains the AHCI drivers) and write caching is grayed out in device manager and impossible to enable. In vista the default "standard ahci controller' driver support write caching just fine but if you are still using xp stick to IDE.
 
Pain|Killer said:
It worked for me too..woohoo..cool..:cool:

But i can't find any performance gain.:confused: What about you chrispycruch. Are u enjoying it? or switching back to IDE? ;)
Click to expand...

Once you go AHCI, you can't go back (to IDE) :)
I don't 'feel' much performance gain either. it's more of a placebo effect. My boot time increases maybe 5 more seconds with this stupid "AHCI ONLY SUPORTS CDROM< SATA" message.

Unlike the poster above, I was able to enable write cacheing.

I'll leave it, to spite MS XP's lack of easy support for it :)
 
shiznit said:
It's possible but not worth it, Intel's AHCI drivers currently don't support write caching and you will have lower performance than legacy. I have tried in both Vista and XP x64 with the latest Intel Storage Matrix (it contains the AHCI drivers) and write caching is grayed out in device manager and impossible to enable. In vista the default "standard ahci controller' driver support write caching just fine but if you are still using xp stick to IDE.
Click to expand...

No dude, It can be enabled. I enabled it and after enabling, it was grayed out. I can't change it now.
 
Pain|Killer said:
No dude, It can be enabled. I enabled it and after enabling, it was grayed out. I can't change it now.
Click to expand...
you have no idea how much time i spent trying to get this to work, and no matter what i checked in device manager it would stay disabled. You mind showing me a screenshot of you HD's policies tab?
 
I think AHCI is worth it for hot swapping alone (which I use all the time). Except that this this feature doesn't seem to be working on my P35 board (no safely remove media dialog box); though it does work fine on my old Nforce board. Otherwise, AHCI isn't important in most home systems.
 
I only meant that it wasn't worth it in the sense that losing write caching is huge loss in performance. If I was using Vista fulltime (still waiting for nvidia to fix CRT support), I would definitely use AHCI since the Microsoft driver definitely supports it unlike the Intel driver. Unfortunately in XP x64 there is no Microsoft driver and you have to use Intel's, the write caching section in the HD's policies tab is grayed out and impossible to enable, and HD benchmarks definitely prove it.
 
Pain|Killer said:
No dude, It can be enabled. I enabled it and after enabling, it was grayed out. I can't change it now.
Click to expand...

That was my experience too. I had just used the aforementioned pcper thread to enable AHCI.
I changed it, but looking now, it's greyed out now.
 
Since I am way too up-to-date to use IDE/SATA and am now using AHCI :) , I don't know if write-caching is supported in IDE mode.

In AHCI, I finally found one benefit for using this. In VMWare workstation, performance tuning:

"Enabling Host Disk Caching on Microsoft Windows Hosts
On Windows hosts, the Disk Properties Policies page associated with each hard drive
provides a check box for enabling write caching on the disk and, in some cases,
enabling advanced performance on the disk. Checking one or both of these boxes can
improve host disk performance in general. Checking them for the host disks containing
VMware virtual disk files can improve VMware disk performance in particular,
especially when VMware is making heavy use of the disk. The following procedure
provides instructions for using these settings on a Windows XP host."
 
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