change XP to use AHCI disk mode rather than IDE

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Guest

I just moved my XP system disk from an older system to a newer system
(it's OK, it's legit -- a retail version of XP, not OEM). It runs fine
after some driver changes. The system disk I moved is SATA, but was
accessed in IDE mode by the old system. On the newer system, I would
like to access the disk in AHCI mode, but right now I am using IDE mode
because XP won't boot this disk in AHCI mode.

I know about the drive controller driver issue with AHCI in XP. I
probably would simply do a repair install of XP except that I have no
floppy drive in the new system, and would have no way of introducing the
AHCI drivers during the repair process.

Is there any other way to replace the IDE drivers with AHCI drivers?
This would seem to be conceptually a simple task, just replacing drivers
(and fixing registry entries?). However, I haven't yet found any
procedure to do that. (Apparently, Microsoft wants me to upgrade to
Vista instead.)

How do I change from IDE drivers to AHCI drivers?

Bob
 
Well, I figured it out -- at last for my system and circumstances.

I found several descriptions of how to go about this on the web. Except for
a repair install, they all involved rather significant edits to the
registry. What I did was much simpler.

I extracted the driver folders from the Intel storage manager installer (it
requires command line arguments -- use -? to find out what).

In Device Manager, I opened the IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers and found the
Intel ICH9 SATA IDE controller (I had two of them, I only did the following
to one of them).

I right-clicked "update driver" and took the path through the wizard that
allowed me to name a specific driver file (iaahci from the extracted driver
folder) -- in spite of protests from Windows, it allowed it. Then I
rebooted, and before the boot, went into the BIOS setup and changed the
driver mode from "IDE" to "AHCI". Windows rebooted, "found new hardware",
and suggest I reboot again. I did a second restart, and all is well. One
IDE ATA/ATAPI controller in device manager is now listed as the "Intel ICH9
SATA AHCI controller".

The system runs pretty much the same; I just learned this particular drive I
have does not support native command queuing, which was one of my goals for
the change.

Oh, well -- but it was a lot easier than I feared.

Bob
 
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