Problem Installing Vista with AHCI Enabled.

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.

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

Please help.

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

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