What have I done...

[ringo747]

Reinstalled windows 7, PC rebooted and now it is stuck at this screen:

Serial ATA ACHI BIOS, Version iSrc.....

Controller Bus#00, Device ..... 06 ports, 04 devices

It won't go any further and I can't even get into BIOS.

What is going on?

 

[ringo747]

If I unplug my main drive it will go past this.

Faulty HDD? or maybe controller?

 

[Blue160]

Have you tried a different SATA port and cable?

Test the hard disk with the manufacturers diagnostic tool. If you don't have it you should find it on their website. You'll have to create a bootable disk to do this.

Hopefully that will pin down where the problem is.

 

[ringo747]

I tried different ports and no luck. Any time the drive is connected it won't go past the same point.

It is a vertex 2e SSD so hopefully can find the diag tool for it.

 

[ringo747]

Well I went into BIOS after disconnecting the drive and then reset optimised defaults.

Now I can get back in to resume installing windows 7. Before resetting BIOS I had set AHCI mode. Resetting optimised defaults I am guessing will have set IDE. Is this likely to cause me issues?

Update: I set this back to AHCI and now it won't boot again.

 

[Blue160]

SSD's will take a performance hit in IDE mode. Much better to get AHCI running if you can.

 

[ringo747]

I don't know how I can get AHCI running. It won't boot with that set in BIOS.

 

[ringo747]

I tried the registry fix, enable AHCI in BIOS and then it is back to the same problem.

Why wouldn't the disk like AHCI? It was enabled before i decided to reinstall.

 

[ringo747]

Update: got it sorted. Used hirens boot cd and wiped all partitions. Reinstalled windows and it was all ok.

I think I accidentally deleted the 100Mb partition when installing Windows. I'm guessing it holds driver files temporarily. In fact there were a number of 100Mb partitions which probably were from previous installs.