Problem Installing Vista with AHCI Enabled.

[apoth99]

Please help me. I am having serious difficulty installing Windows Vista Ultimate. I belive the problem lies with the SATA HDD that I have. I have attempted to reseach the issue, but have been unable to solve the problem.

My Settings
My motherboard is a: GA-965P-S3.

I have a Seagate 7200.10 (ST3320620AS) 320GB Serial ATA300 HDD.

The HDD is connected in the slot labelled "SATAII0", the other available slots are the "SATAII1", "SATAII2", "SATAII3" and two others labelled "GSATAII0" and GSATAII1"

In the "Intergrated Peripherals" section of the BIOS the following options are selected:

SATA AHCI Mode: AHCI
SATA Port0-3 Native Mode: Disabled
Onboard SATA/IDE Device: Enabled
Onboard SATA/IDE Ctrl Mode: AHCI

The Problem
I am attempting to make a fresh installation.

I load the Vista installation and work my way to the format harddrive section then proceed with the install.

At the moment the installation hangs after the first initial restart at "Completing Installation".

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Nethdude]

I ran into a similar problem trying to install Vista or XP on a GA-965P-DS3.

With Vista, I got the same hang after initial restart. With XP I could complete the OS install but when performing updates, some of them would fail installation with the worst one being SP2.

I thought it was the motherboard and driver issues. After many, many attempts at different drivers I bailed on the Gigabyte MB and switched to an ASUS board (P5B-E). Still ran into the same problems. Next change was the HD. I had been using 2 WD drives (Trying to configure RAID AND AHCI) and switched to a single Seagate. Same problem. Moved from there to trying a different DVD drive (Had been using an IDE drive and switched to a SATA drive). Nope, still had the exact same issues. Arrgh!!!

Finally I decided to check the memory (Kingston Value RAM). I booted from a floppy and ran Memtest+86. Bingo! RAM was bad! (Wish I had checked that first. Would have saved A LOT of time & money)

Ordered a new set (Same Kingston Value RAM), installed, and ran Vista 64 install without a hitch. One note though, I wasn't trying RAID and/or AHCI this time.

Don't know if this helps but it is something easy to check and something that I didn't see mentioned in any of the forum searching I did while trying to solve my problem.

 

[apoth99]

Hey. I had tried memtest over the weekend and made 2 parses with no errors, so I don't think it is the memory. It has do do with the SATA AHCI. I am fairly confident about that. Any other help would be appreciated.

 

[The_OGS]

Hi apoth99,
Friend, with ACHI you get hot-swap HDs (for servers) and you get NCQ (also for servers). ACHI mode can cause complications with SATA optical drives, and there's no way I would use it unless I was gonna setup a RAID array.
Many people think you don't get SATA2 unless ACHI is used - this is of course not true.
So: IDE-mode all the way!
Also, I believe that Seagate 320 will be jumpered for SATA controller (ie. 'SATA1') and you must remove the jumper to enable it for a SATA2 controller,
Regards

 

[apoth99]

Thanks for the input. I actually have the same problem when installing with IDE mode. It halts, occasionally, like after an hour or two if I am lucky it will complete the installation and restart correctly. But I have already noticed the installation start up programme loading lightspeed compared to similar load with IDE.

 

[apoth99]

Please help.

 

[roadrunner197069]

I got a different board but my manual specifically told me to put the HDDSS on SATA 3,4. Maybe check your manual and definately run it in IDE mode.

 

[pxist]

I started to look for the purpose of AHCI and basically, it seems that the harddrive you're using must also support it.
I myself enabled AHCI and my system stil works, however starting Windows vista takes about 7 minutes instead of 1 minute, so there's no profit to gain, and I disabled it.
With your harddrives booting so slow, I would suggest to read the info on jumpersettings, since manufacturers sometimes put it on 1,5 Gb instead of 3Gb/s, however this is not the cause of of your problem.
To troubleshoot your boot issue, I would recommend to put the BIOS in default settings, and then use the software from te manufacturer to initialyze the drive (maxblast for instance for seagate and maxtor), create a partition of let's say 40Gb fat32 and boot from a windows98 CD and make the partition bootable, then see if it boots normally.
If that's the case, the drive itself should be okay, and next step would be to reconfigure the drive at full capacity NTFS, be aware that you need at least windows Xp with SP1 integrated to install a size above 130Gb, Vista doesn't have that problem.
If that also runs fine, you could try to install te raid configuration, which means a clean install, but you got to have the raid drivers available on disk, so you can install them.
During the first part of the setup it's possible to choose for a different raid driver, which should be on the diskette (or any other readble media) and that enables the support for your specific chipset (f.i. Jmicron or so), see to it that you have the latest version avaliable that supports your OS.
That should do the trick, don't install any other drivers the first install and see how it runs, than you can install other chipset drivers, and keep rebooting and checking until finally every piece of hardware is installed

 

[Guest]

This is a problem with Vista not having the necessary drivers.
You can install them in the boot process, with some fiddling; I haven't tried this.
Alternatively install windows using IDE mode, install/update drivers for your motherboard. Then edit the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\Msahci to 0; restart and enable AHCI.
It's odd because it seems like you have to hack the system either way to enable what should be standard, native SATA. Treating SATA drives as ISA disables native command queueing and hot-swapping.

 

[Guest]

That should be:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci\Start
(Sorry for extra message but the site isn't allowing an edit)