Sata drivers gone after a power outage

xterra

Active Member
Oh, your gonna love this one, My aunt brings over her laptop a Dell XPS 1330 i believe.
And It has Vista Premium home I think.

The error was the little bar keeps going back and forth at the windows splash screen just after reboot. Then it would do 1 of 2 things. BSOD and Just a black screen. Stays that way until I reboot.

So a how-to I read online somewhere said that it was most likely a Sata Harddrive driver going missing or corrupt. So Ok, I verified I couldnt see the C:\ drive with a bootable floppy plugged into a usb floppy drive. Every UBCD like cd I have tried could not perform any kind of recovery console command. Leading me to be certain theres no talking going on with the C:\ drive.

So the how-to also said, Reboot, go into bios F2, find Sata Settings, Switch from AHCI to ATA. Which I did, then I put in my Windows Vista Ultimate Full Retail DVD, rebooted, and it went into the repair wizard, and I was able to log into windows like nothing had ever happened.

I've been told that will shut down a cpu if Im running a Duo 2. Which occurred and the 2nd cpu was turned off. I realize I can turn on the cpu again through Msconfig, startup tab(And I did that too). However, I want to put it back in AHCI but when I do through bios, I get a BSOD, sorry I cant give the exact error, laptop isnt in my possession right now, cousin's laptop. Seen a few posts that say, I would have to completely reinstall Vista to get it back into AHCI. Is that true?

Wait theres more.. The types of Sata Settings are confusing me.
Theres AHCI, ACPI StandardPC, ACPI , ATA, Combination, AHCI/RAID, ATA/RAID.
One manual says make sure it on ACPI something, not ACPI standardpc. \

Is there a site out there that can explain the differences. I have googled and googled Im not getting anywhere. Thanks in advance.
 
Do a Google search for "Intel Matrix Storage Manager for Vista" without the quotes, and see what you come up with. :wink: You should be able to find one that you can install on your aunt's system *without reinstalling Vista*, and after that Vista should boot just fine with it set to the AHCI setting. Not too long ago, I had nearly the same problem, except it was with XP, not Vista. Once installing the Intel Storage Manager driver (after having already installed XP), I was able to keep my system at AHCI mode each time I booted, regardless of which one I was trying to boot, XP or Vista, and it would boot up perfectly fine.

Hope it helps.

Jake
 
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