Thursday, July 17, 2008

Enabling AHCI on Asus P5Q-E motherboard after installing Windows XP (ICH10/P45)

1. Go to device manager.
2. Find ATA controllers, right click on existing ATA controller, select "Update driver"
3. Deny any automatic installtion or search for drivers, uncheck "only compatible drivers", click "I have disk" button and point system to the "\Drivers\Raid\IMSM\Driver\32bit" directory on motherboard's support disk (with my MB there is disk called "P5Q Series Intel P45 Chipset Support DVD Rev.373.03").
4. Select "Intel(R) ICH10R SATA AHCI Controller" and do install it.
5. System will ask to reboot. Instead of that you want to do items 2-4 for second ATA controller, listed in device manager.
6. After that reboot your system and during reboot enter the BIOS and change Storage Configuration from IDE to AHCI
7. Let your system boot. It will show message about new hardware found and will ask for one more reboot. Let it be.

Additional resources on this topic:
AHCI on wikipedia
Intel® Matrix Storage Manager
KB article describing similar problem
Another similar solution for ICH9
Yet another solution
ru-board discussion on this problem