[stickyrice]

Hello, I am new and I don't have any formal training or anything. I read whatever I can whenever I can to constantly learn more about pc problems I run into and I seem to have hit a snag. I recently installed Vista Ultimate 64bit and I knew I had to install AHCI drivers during the OS installation, but when I was installing Vista, it never asked me for third party driver. Everything works fine except I have two SATA ports that are just collecting dust inside. I really don't want to have to reinstall the OS and I've been reading upon it for about 2 hours now and I followed the microsoft suggestion about modifying the msshci to 0 in registry, but I don't think it worked. It was 4 before. SATA 1-4 are set to IDE and 1 is my boot drive. 5-6 are to be run only in AHCI or RAID mode. The MS support suggestion only works when the boot drive is the culprit. Is there any way to install AHCI drivers for 5,6, on the MB without reinstalling Vista? It's ASUS m3n78 Pro (it was on sale)
Or, the better question is.....if I plug in the boot drive into 5 or 6, would it work? If it does, then do I have to plug something in the other (6 or 5) to make them both work? The non-boot drive in 5 or 6 works, then why wouldn't it work when I just plug in two storage drives in those ports? I didn't want to mess it up by doing this and I wanted experts' opinions. I tried to be as slear as I could. If you need additional info, let me know please. I'll be looking forward to hearing your solutions. Thanks in advance. Take care.

J

P.S. If you need to look at the manual, it's at http://support.asus....modelname=M3N78 Pro&SLanguage=en-us

Edited by stickyrice, 08 April 2009 - 01:50 AM.

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You'll need to download and extract the AHCI drivers onto your system.
Then go into Device Manager and locate the device that the drivers belong to.
Right click on the device and select Update Driver Software.
Then point the wizard at the location where you downloaded the drivers and install them.

Any problems, post back here (I'm late for dinner and the wife is hollering at me!)

[usasma]

You'll need to download and extract the AHCI drivers onto your system.
Then go into Device Manager and locate the device that the drivers belong to.
Right click on the device and select Update Driver Software.
Then point the wizard at the location where you downloaded the drivers and install them.

Any problems, post back here (I'm late for dinner and the wife is hollering at me!)

[usasma]

I think the drivers that you need are described on page 3.2.4 of your motherboard manual. Make the disk as described, then point the device installer at the disk to get the drivers from it.

[stickyrice]

How do I figure out which device is which? Would it be under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers? or Storage Controllers?

Under IDE ATA/ATAPI,
ATA Channel 0, ATA Channel0, ATA Channel 1, ATA Channel 1, Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller, Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE (I don't know why, but there are two of each)

Under Storage Controllers,
ADQSLPPJ IDE Controller, Microsoft iSCSI Initiator, Silicon Image SiI 3132 SoftRaid 5 Controller, Silicon Image SiI 3512 SATALink Controller.

I also have two PCI SATA controllers to accomodate eSATA and extra hard drives. Thanks!

[usasma]

Do any of the devices in Device Manager show red X's or yellow ?'s If so, they are the device.
If none show the red X's or yellow ?'s, then the devices are most likely installed correctly.

Also, you'll have to check in the BIOS to make sure that they're enabled. That's on the bottom of page 2-19 of your manual (section 2.3.6) and the following pages describe how to enable them. Particularly, please notice that SATA 5 & 6 won't be enabled unless the onboard PCI IDE Controller is disabled (so you won't be able to use any IDE devices).