GA-EP45-UD3R Getting Sata/AHCI working

[Bob5840]

Noobie here - Brand new XP Home system w/E8400 Core 2 Duo, 2 sticks of Corsair TWIN2X2048-8500C5D, 500GB and 1.5TB Seagate SATA drives. Want to setup both drives fror SATA-AHCI.
Downloaded:
motherboard_driver_sataraid_intel_bootdisk_32.exe
from Gigabyte site, (also tried same files from CD) put the files on a floppy. Booted and entered BIOS, both drives recognized. Set SATA RAID/AHCI to AHCI, enabled SATA Port 0-3 Native Mode. Save and exit. Continues on to boot from XP cd. Hit F6 to load storage drivers from floppy. Insert floppy, hit "S" and menu displays only RAID controller items, nothing regarding AHCI like the manual shows. I'm expecting to see "Intel ICH10R SATA AHCI Controller. I want AHCI not RAID! Have I missed something in BIOS? I thought I did my homework. Thanks for all help!

[Bob5840]

Forgot to mention:
SATA2_0 has 500GB drive (my boot drive)
SATA2_1 has 1.5TB drive

Not using Gigabyte SATA controller, just the ICH10(R)

[gampamu]

The RAID driver is good for both AHCI and RAID so go ahead and use it and you should be fine. It's actually better than the ACHI drivers since if you ever decide to set up RAID (non OS disks) on your ssytem, you will be covered. Intel must have done away with the AHCI only drivers for the ICH10R since it is not necessary.

[Bob5840]

Thanks very much for responding - I went and tried the ICH10R SATA RAID controller menu choice (not finding the AHCI choice listed) and Windows continued to load for a minute and then decided that it could not see any drives to load to. What in the world am I missing?

[Bob5840]

Futher clarification - This is brand new, virgin hardware. Was hoping to use both SATA drives in AHCI mode. I bought the right stuff, used the right SATA driver, and followed the right procedure to start an XP Home install on this brand new system. Followed the manual to the letter. After XP asked for the driver floppy and continues for a minute, it says it can't find a drive to load XP to.

I'm really stuck. I'm ready to say the heck with AHCI and just go IDE and see if that will work. This is very depressing after spending all this money on nice hardware and I can't even get XP to load.
Thanks

[Comers]

...
Continues on to boot from XP cd. Hit F6 to load storage drivers from floppy. Insert floppy, hit "S" and menu displays only RAID controller items, nothing regarding AHCI like the manual shows. I'm expecting to see "Intel ICH10R SATA AHCI Controller. I want AHCI not RAID! Have I missed something in BIOS? I thought I did my homework. Thanks for all help!

The menu displays many items but you need to press 'down' arrow to scroll down to 'Intel ICH10R SATA AHCI Controller', then 'Enter' to continue.

[Psycho101]

I know it's not exactly helping you install in AHCI mode, however I thought it may be useful to know. AHCI mode will give you zero performance gain. Its only real use is for hot-swaping SATA drives. It does contain a more eficient way of handling NCQ, but unless you're running something like an applications server you won't notice any difference.

[Bob5840]

SOLVED!

Thanks to each of you for sharing your thoughts.
Comers - you hit it perfectly - this was all caused by me not realizing that the dialog box offering RAID/AHCI controller choices was scrollable. It apppeared to be just a box with about 6 choices to choose from and once I found the correct one, everything else fell into place. I wonder why that dialog box didn't have a scroll bar or at least some text saying down-arrow for more choices.
Thank you very much!
Bob

[Comers]

SOLVED!
I wonder why that dialog box didn't have a scroll bar or at least some text saying down-arrow for more choices.
Thank you very much!
Bob

My point exactly.I guess they did not plan to have more than 5 items in the box. :) Anyway, glad you've done it. Cheers

[grishkafool]

I know it's not exactly helping you install in AHCI mode, however I thought it may be useful to know. AHCI mode will give you zero performance gain. Its only real use is for hot-swaping SATA drives. It does contain a more eficient way of handling NCQ, but unless you're running something like an applications server you won't notice any difference.

^^This^^ and, regarding NCQ, your drive may not be NCQ enabled, as I found out about my Seagate 250...