I have installed Win XP Prof on a SATAII HDD (Seagate Barracuda 7200.10) with AHCI disabled in the BIOS of my GA-G33M-S2H mobo.
Now that the installation is completed, I want try to enable AHCI and SATA Port0-1 Native Mode, but Windows dies during boot with a blue screen.

I tried to install again with AHCI enabled, but I can't find the right drivers to feed Windows with F6 and FDD during the installation. The GA-G33M-S2H does not say a single word about what drivers to use when installing Wind on a SATA drive :-(

The board has the G33/ICH9 chipset installed.
Any help is very much appriciated!

Joachim

Found the fix for the problem here: http://62.109.81.232/cgi-bin/sbb/s [...] 792&start=

Unfortunately it's in German.

That's because Win XP doesn't support AHCI nativley. Did you have to use F6 to install a driver when installing XP?

Try installing Intel Matrix Storage manger, http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Pr [...] 1&lang=eng , then reboot and change to AHCI in your BIOS and see if it boots after that. The Storage Manager should install some drivers along with the app. I'm not 100% sure if it includes the AHCI drivers or not, but I'm almost positive it does.

Let me know how it goes.
-GWolfman

The supported southbridges: ICH6R, ICH6M, ICH7R, ICH7DH, ICH7M
Yours is a ICH9 but the same principle applies. Oh, and by the way, you know that hot plug for SATA is only supported in Vista, not XP.

1) Make sure AHCI is not enabled in your BIOS, otherwise this will not for you.
2) Back up your Windows just in case
3) Download the chipset driver http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support [...] ileID=3110
4) Extract the file to C:\DRIVERS\WIN\SATA.
5) If you have the ICH7M southbridge, go to step 8.
5) Open C:\DRIVERS\WIN\SATA\PREPARE\IMSM_PRE.inf in Notepad.
6) Replace any instance of DEV_27C5 with the following, according to your southbridge:
ICH6R - DEV_2652
ICH6M - DEV_2653
ICH7R - DEV_27C1
ICH7DH - DEV_27C1
ICH7M - DEV_27C5
7) Save the file and close Notepad.
8) Click Start, select Run.
9) In the Open field type C:\DRIVERS\WIN\SATA\PREPARE\INSTALL.CMD and click OK.
10) Restart your computer, and enable AHCI on in your BIOS Setup.
11) Start Windows XP or Windows 2000. The Found New Hardware wizard will start automatically.
12) If running Windows XP:

1. Click No, not this time then click Next.
2. Select Install from a list or specific location (Advanced), then click Next.
3. Select Search for the best driver in these locations.
4. Select Include this location in the search: and specify the path, C:\DRIVERS\WIN\SATA, and click

Thanks Gentlemen, but as I already wrote above I successfully used the procedure I found in the German Gigabyte Forum. This even works for the ICH9 chip.

It includes downloading the Intel® F6 Floppy Installer 7.6.0.1011, that creates a floppy. On the floppy the file iaAHCI.inf needs to be edited: all ocurrences of 2821 need to be changed to 2923.
"iaStor.sys" from the floppy needs to be copied to "windows\system32\drivers\".
Then I had to download ICH9-AHCI.REG and run it. This adds some magic stuff to the registry.

Then reboot and enable AHCI and native mode. Windows detects the new controller. Tell Windows to pick the drivers from the floppy. Another reboot and that's it.

Cheers ... Joachim

Joachim thanks for your instructions and tracking down the German forum posting.

I did what you said with the slight modification that I have no floppy and the F6 floppy creator seems to do nothing in that case. So I downloaded WinImage which the .exe was created with and it exploded the floppy files for me so I could get the right .inf files.

Anyway, following on from the editing, installation iaStor.sys, registry hack and reboot with ACHI enabled I noticed you missed the bit about what to do when the new controller is detected - which is point it at the directory where the iaAHCI.inf file is (i.e. the files on the floppy). After that my device manager listed under "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" a new entry which is "Intel(R) 82801HR/HH/HO SATA AHCI Controller".

After I rebooted Windows told me it had detected a new device, well two actually because I have an external eSATA drive too. But I noticed no real difference - both drives are still listed under "Disk Drives" exactly as they had been before - there is nothing to indicate they are SATA at all, indeed if I fire up SiSSandra it lists them as ATA drives.

So I checked the German forum again and noticed the said you should then install the Intel Matrix Storage Manager which I duly downloaded - but I was unable to get it to install because both the latest .1012 and linked to version .1011 (mentioned on the German site) complained that my system "does not meet the minimum requirements for installing this software".

So I'm wondering if

a) your drives are now listed differently from before
b) you were able to install the IMSM to manage the ACHI features like NCQ (which is what I REALLY wanted all along)

I started looking at other instructions on how to do this - and came across http://tiny.cc/kOEFM - where xisio gives some good instructions including a patched version of the IMSM. Those instructions don't talk about the ICH9 specifically, and only the RAID enabled ICH9R but based on them I hacked the patch for the IMSM files it provides based on ICH9 being DEV_2923 (as also indicated on the German forum). I also added entries in the TXTSETUP.OEM file for the ICH9 like this

iaAHCI_ICH9 = "Intel(R) ICH9 SATA AHCI Controller (Desktop ICH9)"

[Files.scsi.iaAHCI_ICH9]
driver = disk1, iaStor.sys, iaStor
inf = disk1, iaAHCI.inf
catalog = disk1, iaAHCI.cat

[HardwareIds.scsi.iaAHCI_ICH9]
id = "PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2923&CC_0106","iaStor"

then ran the PREPARE/install.cmd script crossing my fingers.

After rebooting I didn't see anything magical happen and I still couldn't get the IMSM to install getting the same error as before. I've googled a bit on that error and haven't found anyone that got a solution other than reinstalling XP from scratch - which is exactly what I'm trying to avoid. Ironically I'm in this whole mess because XP wouldn't install for me without using the f6 method, but after doing so it seemed to have not installed the drives as SATA, probably because I hadn't enable ACHI at the time (because I didn't know better then). So I got SATA drives in IDE emulation mode...

But I think I'm getting close and I'll be damned if I'm going to spend several more days reinstalling from scratch, or attempting a repair operation which I have no faith in (even with a full system backup).

You need to enable Raid support for ahci to work install the chipset raid driver To my understanding xp dont support this feature xp media does but this may work on xp with the raid driver installed

I also noticed that now if I disable ACHI in BIOS when I boot the device manager now lists two entries under the IDE ATA/ATAPI Controller section that weren't there before:

"Intel(R) ICH9 2 port Serial ATA Storage Controller 1" DEV_2921
"Intel(R) ICH9 2 port Serial ATA Storage Controller 2" DEV_2926

Or maybe they were all along... But my drives are still not listed as SATA by SiSandra or the device manager.

So I did some more digging and found PCI device ID 2923 listed as "82801IB (ICH9) 4 port SATA AHCI Controller" (http://pci-ids.ucw.cz/iii/?i=8086:sub=1)

and then I found this page:

http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/sb/CS-026488.htm

which in note 1 says:

so that pretty much explains why the matrix storage manager is not letting me install it.

I guess if there is some other way to get NCQ mode without using the IMSM I'll have to figure it out myself....

NCQ seems to be a subject many people do not know much about now a days, but here we go. NCQ mode is enabled by default on your drive's firmware if your drive has NCQ capablilaty (there is no way you can change it). You drive will know if it should disable or enable NCQ according to if you have AHCI enabled or disabled in the bios/cmos. From there altering the way it caches and handles information can be done from within device manager.

It just takes 3/4 steps to do,
1) having a NCQ capable drive
2) having a AHCI/NCQ capable Controller (such and ICH9/R, with drivers)
3) enabling AHCI in bios
4) Caching in device manager is up to u, regardless of this 4th step NCQ will already be enabled if you follow steps 1thru3. (caching is risky, if you over clock things and your computer freezes alot then caching is highly not reccomended)

NOTE: Storage manager is not required, just makes it easier to manage and easier to make changes. the ICH9R is fully supported by Intel, however the ICH9 (without the R, non-raid) is not "officially" supported by Intel, HOWEVER it will work with the modified drivers. Hope that clears things up.

On to weather it is worth all the trouble or not, that all up to each individual drive, for the most part most NCQ enabled drives handling of data starts off slow but ends up fast, with it disable it starts off faster but performace slows down as the transfer go longer. In other words long transfers AND/OR many transfers at the same time and NCQ is better, but if you are doing small single file transfers at once then disabled is better.

below is a cheasy but well detailed "real life usage" benchmark (non-synthetic benchmark) on NCQ. (non synthetic benchmarks are always better as its more real life situation(s). Most other benchmarks u will find on site are synthetic and use a HD program to try and benchmark as the cache gets larger on drives now a days speed burst on those benchmarking apps become less reliable.
http://mysite.verizon.net/res6pakd [...] e_test.htm

Hi All,

This sounds exactly the problem I'm having: EXCEPT that it also affects my DVD drive, and AHCI is disabled. In fact, I can't boot signficantly (more than 5-10MB) from DVD or IDE HD - only small bootables like DSLinux will work.

I've not implemented the fix above yet, but as I say, AHCI is disabled on my BIOS, so it shouldn't impact the boot; I've tested it both ways, and I have the latest F3 BIOS on my GA-G33M-S2H.

Has anyone any ideas?

Thanks!


Damian