AHCI Drivers and XP

Nakira89 · 16 Sep 2010 at 10:27

Hi all.
I have installed XP on my system, however, i need to install the AHCI drivers. The problem is that i cannot find a clear guide on how to do this. The guides i have found that tell me how to install AHCI drivers after installing XP (not during) which is what i need, however, they also seem to be intel specific.

Hope someone can point me in the right direction.

Thanks in advance.

Josh.

Broken Hope · 16 Sep 2010 at 12:30

You have to install them during setup, it will say something like press F6 to install raid drivers, on the first blue screen of the setup installer. You'll also need a floppy disk.

alex24 · 16 Sep 2010 at 12:32

What is your system spec?

Also, why do you need AHCI? Might be a bit less fuss to just not bother unless you really need it for hotplug etc. Performance difference isn't much iirc.

hp7909 · 16 Sep 2010 at 15:30

alexhull24 does have a point. On an old system I had, benchmarks showed that the hard disk was running slightly slower in AHCI mode than in IDE. That said, it could have been down to the chipset & or even drivers

SiriusB · 16 Sep 2010 at 18:29

Install XP using IDE mode.

Upgrade to Service Pack 3.

Change mode to AHCI.

XP has supported AHCI out the box since SP2.

[TBR]MadMark · 16 Sep 2010 at 18:40

You may struggle to even load during install, for some reason the latest intel drivers will load the necessary drivers for raid but not ahci. I tried earlier this year with a ICH10R mother board and it seemed to load the drivers fine but blue screened just before the windows starts to set up. If you look on the internet this issue is fairly well documented, Vista and 7 do not have this problem. The most sucessful way is to try to convert once installed but even this 1) not easy and 2) not always sucessful.
If you want to try there a couple of well documented ways but remember to have everthing backed up if it goes wrong a reinstall may be your only option.