• New Hard Drive to install Win7 On, IDE RAID or AHCI?
    6 replies, posted
I currently have two hard drives which I run XP on, and I bought a new Hitachi SATA 1TB hard drive that I want to install Windows 7 on to have a dual-boot (not quite ready to give up XP just yet =P). Anyway, I noticed in the BIOS that I currently have storage set to IDE, but it is also giving me options for RAID and AHCI. I've never configured this before, so I am wondering what I should choose now for my new hard drive, or whether I should just leave it at IDE. Also, device manager in XP shows the Hitachi drive as enabled, yet it is not showing up under My Computer. Do I have to initialize it under device management to install Windows 7? Thanks.
AHCI, IDE is legacy.
Since you're dual booting with XP I wouldn't recommend changing to AHCI, as apparently it's quite difficult to get it working on an existing XP installation. If you changed the setting right now then you'd BSOD while booting into Windows. If you were going completely over to 7 then I'd say definitely choose AHCI.
[QUOTE=Roast Beast;17915611]Since you're dual booting with XP I wouldn't recommend changing to AHCI, as apparently it's quite difficult to get it working on an existing XP installation. If you changed the setting right now then you'd BSOD while booting into Windows. If you were going completely over to 7 then I'd say definitely choose AHCI.[/QUOTE] Well, I'm not. Atleast until I can safely say Windows 7 works well for me I want to keep XP, plus I don't yet feel like reinstalling all my programs and games. I'll just keep it at IDE for now I suppose for simplicity sake.
Well if you ever decide to go fully 7, it's easy to get AHCI working on an existing 7 installation.
[QUOTE=Roast Beast;17915706]Well if you ever decide to go fully 7, it's easy to get AHCI working on an existing 7 installation.[/QUOTE] Thanks for your help. Alright, one more question than. If I eventually decide to remove my old hard drives with XP and just stay with 7, can I then switch over to AHCI or would I have to reformat and reinstall 7?
Don't need to reformat, all you have to do is follow the instructions in [url=http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976]this[/url] article, then you can switch to AHCI mode without problems.
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