How to safely upgrade from IDE to AHCI settings

iffee82

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Jan 27, 2012
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I had a not so old system with corei7 2600K + gigabyte GA-Z68-B3
win7 was the mainOS which I installed diretly on SSD (ADATA-120GB), after that had a 1TB WD drive for data, and later I bought a 2TB seagate drive which I used to install windows 8 and then upgraded to 8.1. I also had a linux mint installed on the seagate drive on a separate partition.

Now, I had to move and I took the SSD and HDDs and DDR3s , left the rest of the system. Now I purchased Gigabyte H77-HD3 board and core i5 4670 processor + Corsair GS600 PSU. The system started and windows 8.1 was able to start after doing startup repair (no OS loaded at the beginning except linux mint). While nothing worked in case of windows 7. I have all my programs and software needed to work on windows 7 so I was desperate to have it working.

Yesterday, I noticed that my old sytem had SATA drives configured in IDE mode, so I went into BIOS and saw that SATA were configured in AHCI mode by default. I changed it to IDE mode and I was able to boot into windows 7 after doing startup repair.

Now, win 8.1 wont start and restarts immediately after showing a brief message that something went wrong with the windows. I can imagine now that it has something to do with IDE to AHCI settings. So here is the question with all the background?

Shall I move the SATA settings to AHCI in BIOS and is it advantageous? I am not an expert but I would like doing to upgrade if it is better, and I also want to keep the windows 7 system intact.

If someone points me to the right direction or guide me in steps how to do it, I would be thankful.

regards

P.S. sorry if the post is too long , i wanted to make it clear how did I got to this point.