XP Pro - Will this work to disable AHCI?

[Linflas]

I have a workstation that the OS was installed with AHCI enabled. For compatibility issues with a specific piece of software I need to turn it off. If I uninstall the AHCI drivers and device and reboot, enter BIOS and set back to native mode will it load the standard XP SATA drivers on boot or should I install them in advance before the reboot?

 

[Ketchup]

I did the same thing with my windows 7 box without issue, but I don't think you are going to have the same luck with XP (unless your box is pretty old.) Take the safe option and make sure the drivers are there (and do some backing up while you're at it.) I think worse case would be a repair install of XP though.

 

[Linflas]

I just tried it and it didn't work. Once I switched it back to AHCI in the BIOS it booted and reinstalled the AMD AHCI drivers. I have an image of the machine so I am not worried about trashing it along the way as long as I can figure out how to do this without a rebuild. I was thinking of the repair install as a last resort option but it might be easier in that case to just do a fresh build.

 

[Ketchup]

Did it give you anything to go on when you switched? Blue screen?

 

[Linflas]

Nah just the XP splash screen briefly then reboot, after the first time it does display the "did not start correctly" options. I tried safe mode and command line as well. I believe what I need to do is add the registry entries manually much like you have to do when going the other direction (IDE->AHCI).

 

[Ketchup]

OK, so it's doing the same thing it would do if you moved a hard drive from an AMD to an Intel system. XP does not like changing hard drive controllers. In my experience a repair install (or full) was the only way around such an issue, but others may know of a way to "fix" it.

 

[Linflas]

OK, so it's doing the same thing it would do if you moved a hard drive from an AMD to an Intel system. XP does not like changing hard drive controllers. In my experience a repair install (or full) was the only way around such an issue, but others may know of a way to "fix" it.

Funny you mention that. That was actually one of my earlier attempts at dealing with this problem before I figured out it was being caused by the AHCI. I had an HP 5100 that was used before this one and tried imaging it over on this box but as you noted it did the same thing and I figured it was because of the CPU difference. Tomorrow I am going to try the registry method first and if that doesn't work then the repair install.

 

[SimMike2]

Personally, I would get rid of the troublesome software before turning off AHCI.

 

[Ketchup]

I would personally love to know if there is a way to switch XP back and forth.

 

[Linflas]

I would personally love to know if there is a way to switch XP back and forth.

I ended up going with the repair install as this was costing me too much time however I did find something along the lines of what I was thinking with the registry method called FixIDE. I tried it with no success but think I messed up by not uninstalling the AHCI drivers prior to using it. I have another disk with the image on it that I am going to test it with once I have gotten the machine working properly with the repair installed OS. I will update the thread with the results.

Note: Found a nice gotcha with the repair install, if you do it with IE8 installed it will sit endlessly at Please Wait... on the last reboot to start the repaired OS. Solution is to reboot into safe mode and reinstall it with the .exe installer.

 

[Linflas]

As promised a final followup to this. As I stated in my last post the piece I did not do correctly before using FixIDE was to uninstall the AMD AHCI drivers in Device Manager. So there are 2 ways to accomplish the same goal and the FixIDE is the quickest should you care to use it. It can be found at www.foolishit.com. What he appears to have done is collect all the necessary registry entries and written a small program to insert them into the registry of system you are looking to convert by using the load hive function.

You need to copy the 4 .sys files into that same directory off of an XP install disk. Note 3 of the 4 files were in the SP3.CAB file so assuming you are using an updated system you will want those and if you have a slip streamed install CD the .cab will be in the i386 directory. I used the non-install version of his app so it didn't even require any mods to the system I used to plug the disk into to make the changes. Be sure to change the BIOS to Native IDE mode when you put the disk back in the workstation and you should now have a bootable non-AHCI XP system.

 

[Ketchup]

Cool, very nice find. Glad they put that under "fix my computer" in Windows 7.