AHCI & Data Drives

[geoffry]

Hey all,

Quick question...I just got my 120GB Vertex 2 (woot!) and was looking through various SSD guides.

Consensus is to switch from IDE to AHCI, which I read would make your data inaccessible (I'm reinstalling Windows 7 so its all good)...but would it make my other data drives inaccessible as well once Windows 7 is reinstalled?

Will I need to reformat these drives again and fill them back up?

Thanks in advance.

 

[RebateMonger]

Changing a disk controller from IDE to AHCI won't make a data disk inaccessible as long as Windows has loaded an appropriate AHCI disk controller driver. The problem with changing from an IDE to an AHCI disk controller is that Windows doesn't know how to automatically switch disk controller drivers when it encounters the change. So Windows won't boot. Once the proper drivers are inserted into Windows, Windows can talk to the disk controller, boot to it, and read data from it (and any attached disks).

 

[geoffry]

Thank you kindly.

I also did some Googling (prob shoulda done a bit more searching before posting) and it looks like I should be fine.

 

[kmmatney]

I didn't have any trouble switching from IDE to AHCI mode with Windows 7 - without losing data. You just change the registry setting (easily found on Google) and then restart, switching to AHCI mode in the BIOS. Win 7 started up fine and then installed the appropriate drivers.

With Windows XP, you pretty much have to re-install if you want to enable AHCI, but its not the case with Windows 7.

 

[mv2devnull]

With Windows XP, you pretty much have to re-install if you want to enable AHCI, but its not the case with Windows 7.

No need for total reinstall even with the XP: just a bit tricky change of driver.

And with the non-system drives the change is trivial anyway; those additional drives are not needed for the operation of the OS, and therefore when OS does function you can always install required drivers for the "new" devices.

 

[C1]

True. Been there done that with XP.

One just needs to install the correct Intel Matrix Storage Manager version