AHCI or IDE?

[kris77]

I have a Gigabyte UD3 board with an I7 860 and a seagate 7200.12 1tb HD.

What is the difference in ACHI and IDE mode for the sata connectors?

And which one should i be using?

Im running XP 32 bit right now but have Win 7 64 bit on the way. Plan on dual booting just in case i need the 32 bit for something.

[The Wise Monkey]

If all of your hard drives and optical drives are SATA, then use AHCI mode, as this enables several features for SATA drives that are otherwise disabled e.g. hot-swapping, better power management. Otherwise, you should leave it as IDE.

I doubt you will need the XP installation, but it never hurts to have a little insurance. :)

[kris77]

Right now they are set to IDE. And when i was installing win XP, it got about halfway finished and "blue screen" IRQL_NOT_LES_OR_EQUAL. Tried 2 different hard drives. reseated memory. nothing worked. Reset bios settings to fail/safe.
Then i decided to format a partition of 80 gig on my 1tb drive and Xp installed. Dont understand it. I thought it might be because of the sata drives not being in AHCI.

Now when i reset the bios to fail/safe, it puts pretty much bare minium settings in there right? And if i go back in and set them to optimim settings, will it affect my system any?

[The Wise Monkey]

What version of XP was it? Pre-SP2? There is an issue with SP1 in that it only supports partitions up to 128GB, iirc. Try formatting the rest of the hard drive, or create a few more partitions, from within XP and see if that works.

Fail-safe options are pretty much all you need. This undoes any overclocks/potential performance enhances you have implemented in order to return the system to its most stable state. Using optimum settings should be fine though.

[kris77]

It was SP1. So that was my problem all along. I thought some of my new hardware was bad.

Once I got XP installed and updated, i could create partitions and move them around and do what I needed to.

Thanks, Your very helpful.

One more question since your in the answering mood....

XP gets stuck at the "loading XP" screen where the scrolling bar goes back and forth for like 15 minutes, then it finally logs on and is fine. Im thinking there is some kind of set timeout for this, but I cant figure out what is causing it to hang in the first place.

[The Wise Monkey]

Sounds like it could be a driver issue. Try booting in safe mode and see if it loads quickly. If so, try removing and re-installing a few of the usual driver suspects e.g. chipset, graphics, sound etc.

[RickyTick]

I'm not altogether sure if this relates to what you guys are talking about, but it seemed appropriate. Just ran across it today.
http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=499

[kris77]

Ok, I think i have gotten off topic a bit. let me clarify what exactly is going on. First, when i try to install Win XP. It gets pretty close to halfway through and then errors with the above IRQL_NOT_LES_OR_EQUAL message. I think i narrowed it down the XP SP1 install disk not recognizing certain partitions. I was only able to install it once on an 80 gig partition. but it was super slow and my drivers kept dropping out.

I found a program called nLITE that will let me take my XP SP1 disk and incorporate SP3 into that. Im in the process of making that DVD as we speak and I will try it when i get home.

I have tested the memory over night with memtest. switched hard drives. switched video cards. removed all unnecessary componets and still get the same message. So if this new CD will not work, i guess i have it narrowed down to the system board or the cpu.

Its a very weird problem. And this problem is why i started the AHCI or IDE thread. I thought my bios settings may be causing the problem.

I incorporated the MOBO's sata drivers into the XP install disk as well, so i do an F6 install and run in AHCI mode.

I'll post an update when i get home this evening and try it. Any other suggestions, i'll be happy to try as well.

[kris77]

When i got home and tried the new CD i made, it worked. So the problem was with SP1 installation disk. Once i put SP2 and 3 on the disk and made an iso it worked.

Strange.

[The Wise Monkey]

Well, SP1 is reaaaaally old now, and is no longer supported by Microsoft. In fact, they consider XP SP2 as the new starting point for XP, as they made a huge number of security and usability changes for SP2.

This is why, in case you ever wondered, they only offer compatibility mode options back to XP SP2 and not SP1. :)

Anyhow, glad it now works.