newbie - trouble installing vista to msi x58 platinum

[shadesofjay]

This used to be so straightforward... now it's a real PITA.

So, I have he MSI X58 Platinum and my Vista install disk. Planning on running 64-bit. Got my SATA drive plugged into SATA1. No RAID.

I pretty much understood that I need to install SATA drivers so I looked things up in the manual, copied the ICH10R AHCI drivers from the f6flpy64 folder on the MSI Vista drivers disk to a USB drive.

I start the vista install, as expected it doesn't find any drivers, so I navigate to my usb drive and nothing. No drivers listed. I uncheck the item to hide drivers incompatible with my system and they they are. I select the ICH10R AHCI driver, it looks like it installs something, but no drives are listed.

I looked in the BIOS and I couldn't see where to confirm that I was using AHCI, but since Vista can't find the drives, I'm clearly not in ATA mode nor am I running RAID.

What am I missing?

 

[anindrew]

Hi there! I have the Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5, which is another X58 board. I installed Vista Home Premium x64. I had a USB flash drive that died after a month (at least I could RMA it), so when it came time to install the SATA drivers, I noticed that I could browse to the actual driver DVD. I figured that would be better than using a floppy. Perhaps you can try that as Vista should look for compatible drivers in the folder(s) you choose. It worked for me! And my drives are working in AHCI mode.

 

[shadesofjay]

Yep, tried that too. Browsed to the same folder on the CD. Again, if I uncheck the box in the vista installer that says hide drivers incompatible with my system, the ICH10R drivers are listed, but installing them doesn't cause the drive to show up.

 

[Old Hippie]

I looked in the BIOS and I couldn't see where to confirm that I was using AHCI

That's what you're missing. Look in your manual.

Vista will install those drivers automatically after you set the BIOS correctly.

 

[anindrew]

Old Hippie has a good point. I had to set my SATA ports to use AHCI mode. That was one of the first things I did after turning my system on for the first time. It's probably called something similar to "RAID/AHCI" or "NCQ mode" in your BIOS. Also, make sure you're using a SATA port that supports AHCI.