RSSWindows Vista and SATA hard drives
Aug 20
I just upgraded my work laptop from Windows XP to Windows Vista. As XP doesn’t support SATA hard drives natively I had changed the drive to “compatibility mode” in the BIOS – thus making it look like a “normal” IDE disk. This made it work, but with a slight performance penalty.
However… Before installing Vista I forgot to change the setting back.
“No problem!” I thought. “I’ll just change it now, Windows will see a new drive controller, and I’ll be back in business.”
Great thought. Only it didn’t work. The machine starts to boot, and then crashes out to the good ol’ Blue Screen of Death. It seems that at install time, Vista disables the drivers that it doesn’t actually need to boot the system up. This is great, unless you do something like this. It could also happen if, for example, you buy a new machine and use Ghost or True Image to clone the disk into the new machine. (Okay, so if you’re running Vista it’s most likely to be on a SATA disk already, but it could happen!)
Turns out there is an easy solution:
- Change the drive setting to compatibility mode.
- Boot up and log in.
- Run regedit.
- Look for HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\msahci.
- Change the value of the “Start” entry to “0″ (zero).
- Close regedit and reboot.
- Change the BIOS setting back to native AHCI.
Of course, your milage may vary, and I recommend taking a backup of the registry key before making changes to it. While you’re at it, clone the entire disk, just in case. And if you break it, congratulations, you now own both pieces.