The Bit Mine

5 Mar 09

Getting SATA drives working under Windows 7

This is mostly a note to myself, but if you have SATA drives, an Asus P5B Deluxe motherboard, and Windows 7, it might be of interest to you as well.

  1. Enter then BIOS and put the drives in IDE compatibility mode.
  2. Install Windows 7.
  3. Open regedit and set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\msahci\Start to 0 (zero). This enables the built-in AHCI driver in Windows (see note below).
  4. Reboot. In the BIOS, switch from IDE compatability to AHCI.
  5. Windows should re-detect your drives and SATA controllers. Download the latest Intel Matrix Storage Manager. Run the installer as administrator. Reboot.
  6. When you boot back into Windows, your drives will again be re-detected, this time by the Intel drivers.
Note: Why not just install the Matrix drivers before while in IDE mode? The Intel installer won’t let you, and if you try to install or update the extracted drivers manually, Windows will also refuse. This is problematic because the AHCI driver that comes with Win7 is apparently crashy on some systems. You might not be able to get the system running in AHCI mode long enough to install the Intel drivers.