Converting to AHCI with Windows 8?

cboath

Senior member
Nov 19, 2007
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I know there are a lot of posts on AHCI in general but I've not seen any with win8.

Basically, the msahci key has been changed to storahci.

According to things i've seen written under the consumer preview it says to change a setting under the storahci/startoverride subkey. That's all well and good except I don't have the keys under startoverride.

Has anyone converted successfully under win8 rtm yet?

Not sure how this affects things, but the boot drive is an SATA HDD hosting win7 and the boot files of 8 and win8 is installed on an SSD.
 

cboath

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Nov 19, 2007
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I've got an Asus 6pT deluxe v2 - there are no win 8 drivers. Should I just get the intel version?

My start is already set to 0. For the override key, you deleted the who subkey?
 

cboath

Senior member
Nov 19, 2007
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For anyone in the same spot, after another full week of searching I found a solution.

I meant to post this yesterday while at the machine so I could post full registry locations, but forgot :)

Anyhow, I want to say the key to change in Win8 is this:

CurrentConfiguration\Services\storahci\startoverride

In that folder, the key/Dword was 0 with a value of 3. Change the value of 3 to 0.

Reboot

Enter Bios

Enable AHCI

Restart

Failed to find drives

Restarted again into bios

Checked AHCI confi, said it detected all drives

Restarted again

Everything fired up.

Ran an AS-SSD check and my drive was on ahci and my score more than doubled.

Running a check of the registry showed that the net effect of changing the key above was that the startoverride entry was removed.

Hope it helps someone else down the road!
 

KAZANI

Senior member
Sep 10, 2006
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You beat me to it, cboath. I will just add that in my case the detection was instant (my m/b chipset is of the newest line - H77). Also the "startoveride" tree is now gone from the registry. I too was having trouble with the solution circulating the web, which clearly involved a registry key specific to the pre-official release. Out of coincidence, yesterday I read on the eightforums about the "0" key. It was suggested that one installed the m/b manufacturer's RAID/AHCI preinstall driver before changing the registry. In my driver package there were 2 .sys and 2 .inf files and I couldn't decide which one I needed, so I decided to create a system restore point and try the tweak without the drivers. Thankfully, it worked (kudos to Microsoft for excellent driver support). Now my WEI score has increased from 7.6 to 8.1 and OS load times have dropped too.
 

cboath

Senior member
Nov 19, 2007
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Mine's an X58 board. I checked the Asus site earlier in the month and there were no 8 drivers there at all. Unless the boards had come out on the market after June, the drivers should be in Win8 i'd think. Not sure when the 77's came on the scene, though.

I figured the worst that could happen was it wouldn't boot and i'd have to redo reg key(s) by booting into Win7 instead.

Is there anything more to tweaking an SSD? I've seen people with the same drive scoring 100 higher on the ASSSD logs, but they usually have 77 chipsets.