Can't Boot WD 1TB Drive as ACHI

[jaiello]

I am building a new system for my brother and encountered a weird problem. The MB is a P5E Deluxe with the newest BIOS. I installed a 1TB Western Digital Drive in it and tried to boot the OS that I installed on it from another MB. In the BIOS the drive is configured as AHCI. When I try and boot the machine the drive hangs on the boot screen as it tries to read the drive. If I change the BIOS to IDE it boots fine. I changed the drive to a Raptor I had laying around and it boots with the BIOS set to AHCI no problem. Why would this drive fail at the boot screen? Bad drive? I have not yet tried to boot it in another machine. I will try that next. I just never saw this before. Anyone else?

 

[C1]

I would imagine that you are using two different types of MBs (as opposed to two MBs of the same kind). If so, I would suspect that the problematic MB requires use of different controller suites (ie, INTEL Matrix Storage Manager suites).

There's a way to fix it without reinstallation of the OS, but it is beyond what Im willing to describe. It has been addressed already at various times in these forums so just do a search.

 

[jaiello]

I don't think you understood what I was trying to say. The system hangs on the BIOS detection. This happens before any OS tries to load so it's not at all what you were suggesting. By the way, I put the offening drive in another system and it booted set to AHCI no problem. So now I am really stumped. To summarize. The 1TB drive will boot as ACHI in another system but not in the system I want it in. It will boot as IDE so I got that going for me. A different drive will boot when set to AHCI in the system I want the 1TB drive in which baffles me to no end.

 

[C1]

Verify that you can see the drive from the BIOS with AHCI enabled. If so, wipe the drive & do a correct OS installation. If you cannot see the drive from within the BIOS then Im not sure what is going on. In general, when this happens, I wipe the drive clean and then retest. It is possible that the BIOS/controller on that MB are incompatible with that particular HDD's firmware implementation for AHCI.

For example, look at this thread at: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=296080

In order for AHCI to work the followings should cooperate.
- Mobo chipset (south bridge, not north bridge)
- HDD firmware (some HDDs have aggressive caching mechanism thus cause conflicts with hot plugging)
- OS and drivers (generally newer OS and drivers are better, and if possible use native OS drivers)

 

[Binky]

I've also had trouble on another Asus board (P5E-VM I think) with AHCI. I think the board has some quirky issues with AHCI. I even got so far as to install Windows under AHCI, then I moved some drives around and the damned thing wouldn't ever boot again under AHCI. I just gave up and left it at IDE.

 

[jaiello]

To C1: Again, I don't think you are reading the entire post. I cannot boot the computer past the drive detection in the BIOS when ACHI is enabled. In order to boot this computer when this drive in the system is to unplug it in order to get it to boot and change the BIOS to IDE. When the BIOS is set to ACHI the machine hangs at the drive detection phase. Again, with a different HD I can boot when the BIOS is set to AHCI and if I stick the 1TB drive in another machine I can boot it with AHCI enabled. We may never get to the bottom of this one but I may clear the drive and see if having partitions on the drive is what is causing it to hang during the detection phase.

 

[FishAk]

Set the disk to RAID in BIOS, and see if it works that way. It will be in RAID mode, but not a member of an array, essentially the same as ACHI.

 

[C1]

Part of the issue of interpretation has been terminology. MBs Ive used work by "entering the BIOS" (dont boot into a BIOS) and "BOOTing the system" (ie, start up the OS).

Anyway, a reminder that when I say wipe the drive, I mean you must actually wipe it (use the program called "WIPE" not just delete partitions). You want to be sure to zero/clear out anything on sector 0. My guess though is that you may need to find a utility that accesses the drives firmware to inspect the settings. Often there are ways to allow modification of firmware settings. You may have to disable/modify NCQ or HDD power management settings. Also FishAk's suggestion should be tried.