Changing windows boot drive sata config from "raid" to "ahci"

[kayson]

Changing windows boot drive sata config from "raid" to "ahci"

So I have an AMD A88X motherboard in my htpc. For a few reasons I want to change the bios config for the sata controller from RAID to AHCI. I followed the instructions in this article: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...er-you-change-the-sata-mode-of-the-boot-drive to have windows load the ahci driver, but now I can't boot. If I switch the bios option back to RAID, it boots fine. If I boot in safe mode, the system hangs on loading classpnp.sys then reboots (probably because it loads drive.sys right before). If I run the start-up recovery, it has no problem loading the storage drivers and mounting the drive since I can access it from the command prompt. What can I do to boot properly? I'd rather not reinstall windows. Doing a repair type installation is an option but I have to get a bootable USB drive so a simpler solution would be nice. Thanks in advance!

 

[Alaric]

Are there any other drives connected? Fixing a boot drive works best if it's the only drive connected. For some reason Windows likes to hide bootmgr.exe on a separate drive if it can.

 

[kayson]

Are there any other drives connected? Fixing a boot drive works best if it's the only drive connected. For some reason Windows likes to hide bootmgr.exe on a separate drive if it can.

There were but I disconnected them and still no luck. Interestingly, in the startup repair its mounting the drive as D: instead of C:...

 

[Alaric]

Change the drive letter to C: and try startup repair again.

 

[kayson]

I can do that in startup repair by using diskpart, but the startup repair window still lists it as D: (C: is initially assigned to the 100mb system reserved partition)... (when I boot into windows, the correct partition is assigned to C: )

 

[Alaric]

Hmmm. My System Reserved is E:, but I have a storage drive as D: Are you using W10 or W7?

 

[kayson]

This is win7. Its definitely failing on the driver load I just can't seem to get it to load the right driver...

 

[Alaric]

I have the ahci file for W7 registry, but the forum engine doesn't seem to want to accept it. I can email it if you want. Just DM me an email address.

 

[kayson]

What I ended up doing that finally made it work can be found here: https://christian.hofstaedtler.name/blog/2013/01/using-dism-to-add-drivers.html

I both added the Microsoft mshdc.inf and also the amd_sata.inf that I got in the AHCI driver package off the Gigabyte website.

 

[Alaric]

My bad for forgetting the AMD ahci driver. AMD's SATA and ahci tend to be persnickety about being included their chipset driver packages.