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ATA, AHCI, Which?,..Dell inspiron Laptop

J

jimmyj68

Senior member
My first venture with a laptop. Friend with Dell Inspiron model 1545 had a hard drive failure. Dell sent another hard drive gratis under warranty but offered no warranty service. Young lady said what do I do with this thing they sent me - I volunteered to replace her hard drive. Web gave quick and easy remove install directions - Dell sent a preformatted and configured HDD that should just start and load operating system and all program configurations she specified in her original order.

I attempted the operation and screen said "your hard drive has been recognized and we are now loading all your programs and files etc. This operation may take 60 minutes or more. That was some 6 hours ago. I may have made one killer mistake because you are told to not turn off your computer during the setup operation - The laptop was running on battery and before it could finish setup the battery ran down and the machine shut down. Found her AC connect stuff and started the operation again.

In the interim - I looked at what dell calls a bios and system settings for something that might be wrong. The question comes up her system/bios was set for AHCI - is this normal for laptops? Could Dell have sent a hard drive preconfigured in ATA? And if so, will a ATA configured HDD work properly if installed in a machine that is bios set for AHCI?

I need a quick answer because -
I have to return her laptop in the morning (or at least I should).
 
Installing with AHCI on laptops is a common practice, it makes use of some drive performance features.

On its own, Windows doesn't make a deal about the ATA/AHCI setting in the BIOS until after it's installed. Unless Windows was pre-installed there's no way Dell could've configured the drive to run in one mode before sending it out.

I'm not quite sure what sort of information Dell's backup stores though...it could potentially store the registry entries that tell it to work in ATA/AHCI mode but I'm not sure. Even still, if it spits out an error code due to the wrong setting, it's easily fixed by changing to the other mode in BIOS, and changing the registry to the desired option is pretty simple.
 
Dell says the replacement HDD was preconfigured to operate the same way as the original, now failed, HDD - programs - settings - files - operating system and all. I considered changing the bios setting but it warned about maybe losing all info on the drive if changed - that was if I changed from AHCI back to ATA. I've removed the drive and run the machine through a full diagnostic exam with only a glitch on VGA because the diagnostic files were missing (probably on the HDD). But with the drive installed, I couldn't access the diagnostic program probably housed on the motherboard in the bios.

I'm going to set the bios to AHCI, reinstall the new HDD and begin the process again. Maybe that shutdown when the battery failed caused a glitch that I can overcome by starting the machine again with a "new" hard drive installed. If that doesn't work I'll just have to reinstall DELL'S rendition of Vista which will trully wipe the HDD and then reinstall all of her programs that DELL has supplied backup discs for. Why must DELL be so proprietary?
 
Well, it still doesn't work as announced. It seems to be in a loop that doesn't allow it to complete the installation cycle. I don't get it ----if the programs,windows, and everything else is preinstalled on the hard drive why does it need to install anything? Is it installing something on the motherboard - don't think so because the motherboard was reporting a disk failure with the old HDD and we have essentially just removed it and replaced it with an identical twin.

What is it installing????? Does it need to communicate with DELL to insure DELL that the drive is going on the machine it was destined for? I can just barely make out some "DOS" like goings on just over the top of the enormous window that says it is reinstalling so if there is an error message I can't see it and it is probably looping from the error back to the start of the procedure. I don't think the machine can find the web here in my house and it is not hot spot capable because my wireless home network is unavailable to any outside machines.

I guess I'll have to call DELL and ask them how to make the thing work. I don't dare try the process with ATA and risk losing all the info on the HDD.

But I've popped in hard disk drives between identical machines (well same machine different HDD) and the system simply boots and goes from there. Who knows?
 
Back-up an image of the hard-drives contents. Then you can try out whatever you want, such as the ATA install.
 
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