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I have a HP Pavillion Elite d5200t and it is set up for raid. It has one hard drive and I have no intension of ever using Raid. Some programs balk if they spot a Raid controller, and will not install. In the Bios the Sata Controller is enabled and the Sata Controller Mode is Raid. The Options I have are IDE, Raid and AHCI. I need some advice on what to do with this. I'm using Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit.
Change the setting to AHCI. Win 7 should load the AHCI drivers when you next boot it without you having to do anything else.
Sparks Thank You for your fast response. What is AHCI and what changes would I see if any in the response of the computer. I assume everything would still operate normally except for raid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance...ller_Interface
For XP, you should use IDE mode since it lacks native AHCI drivers. Win7 has them built-in.
Midknyte Thank You for your response and the explanation.
Well I went into the bios and changed it to AHCI and saved my changes and exited the bios. Computer started to boot into windows and then crashed. Shut down to protect the operating system. Did a reboot and same thing happened. Shut down and went back into the bios and put it back in raid and saved and exited the bios. windows started to boot and crashed again. Did an inplace repair and a restore and got it back. Did an Image yesterday so I'll image to it. Guess it doesn't want to be changed,
I thought you were going to do a clean install. Changing from RAID to AHCI changes the HAL, so it's no surprise that it crashed.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976
No I wasn't doing a clean install I just wanted to change from Raid to AHCI . So if you make the registry change before you make the change in the bios it should work OK if you make the change and then reboot, it should load the AHCI drivers. What happens to the Raid drivers, there just not active. Right now I've imaged back and all is good.
The RAID drivers wouldn't be used. This is no different from older OSes. Changing the IDE/AHCI/RAID modes causes problems with the HAL. It's almost like changing motherboards.
The fact that you said you had only one hard drive means you can't run RAID anyway. I thought you had removed one drive and were going to do a clean install. Normally, you don't create a RAID array with a single drive.
That's the way it came from HP when I got it in July of this year. So if I make the registry change it should be OK. This is new to me so it's a good learning experience for an old man. What is HAL?
HAL - Hardware Abstraction Layer, a layer of software that hides hardware differences from higher level programs.
Wikipedia: HAL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_abstraction_layer
Windows NT Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/99588
How to Determine the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) That Is Used in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/298898
OK this morning I went into the registry and followed the directions in kb922976 and changed the value from 3 to 0 clicked OK and exited out. Rebooted and went into bios and changed it from Raid to AHCI. system booted up and crashed. Tried a couple of reboots but crashed each time. Error I get is 0X000007B, (0xFFFFF880009A98E8, 0xFFFFFFFFC0000034, 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000) Looks like this system is fighting to stay the way it was shipped and that's in Raid.
When I say crashed I got a black screen saying it was protecting the operating system from starting to prevent damage.
Then you might as well leave it be. I don't see you gaining much by going to AHCI, but I know some people are picky.
I guess that's what I'll probably do, but it still bothers me why it can't be changed.
Like I said, it's the HAL. If you were to try this on XP, you'd have to at least do a repair install. Vista and 7 are better about it, but Windows just doesn't like when you mess with the HAL.
To change would require a reinstall of Windows to create the correct HAL.dll. On some systems, you might find that you would also need to reformat the hard drive after changing the BIOS setting, before reinstalling Windows.
Well, HAL be it's name I'll just leave it be. Thank you to everyone for your help. Just a question, if I ever do a reformat and a clean install is there a way to do it then?
If you do a format and reinstall, change it in the BIOS to AHCI first, and Windows will install the correct HAL without you needing to do anything else at all. I'm a little surprised that it is being so difficult about it actually.
The other thing you could do, is to "upgrade" Win 7 over itself, which is the nearest thing to an XP repair install. Change the BIOS setting, then boot up with the Windows disc, and let Setup start, then make sure that you choose the Upgrade option and not "Custom".
Thank you Sparks for that information.
Well I finally got it done. Couldn't do an in place upgrade cause you have to be in Windows to do that and after I made the change in the BIOS from Raid to AHCI it wouldn't boot into Windows so I did a clean install and every thing is OK now, just reinstalling some stuff. I backed allot of my stuff up before I started all this. Thanks to everyone for your help.