RAID utility files

Estam

Member
Sep 27, 2007
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Hello!

HPE-210y amd and installing Win 7 that has Sata1 and Raid selected in the Bios set up menu.

I have installed Win 7 successfully and all seems to be working fine.

I remember when installing Win XP it could never recognize the HD and needed the Raid files.

Question: Does Win 7 handle this or is there something I need to do?

Many thanks....
 

Paperdoc

Platinum Member
Aug 17, 2006
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I expect you won't have a problem.

Like earlier versions of Windows, XP came with a device driver "built in" for IDE devices, but NOT for the new SATA drives (which really are AHCI devices). The proper way to handle this when installing XP was to use a standard Windows Install feature that allowed you to add the required device driver to the customized installation at a low level so that it became "built in" and XP could actually access the AHCI HDD and boot and run from it. For those who found this troublesome, MANY mobo makers added a "work-around" feature in BIOS setup that allowed you to set the Mode of the HDD controller chips to SATA or AHCI (the "correct" Mode that required the driver to be installed), OR to set it to "IDE Emulation" which limited the HDD interface to using only the older IDE system (avoiding a few new features) so that Win XP believed it really was dealing with an IDE drive it already knew how to use, and was happy. Lots of people used this, rather that doing the driver installation.

Now, IF you chose to do that installation, you had to get the driver from a CD that came with the mobo, just like other custom drivers. VERY often the drivers of both AHCI and RAID devices were packaged together into one "driver" file, so if you loaded in the "RAID" driver that took care of using a new SATA drive as a proper AHCI device, even though you were NOT using the RAID capabilities.

Beginning with Vista, all this was no longer necessary for using SATA drives. Vista and all subsequent Windows versions have both the older IDE and the newer AHCI device drivers built in. So, if you are NOT trying to use RAID, Win 7 will handle the SATA drives all by itself with no further effort by you.