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D630 AHCI cant get it work.

post #1 of 6
8/30/09 at 10:21am
Thread Starter 
I am using ATA mode with XP. Lately I switched to ACHI in bios and do a clean installation.

During setup I press F6 to install ICH8M driver. The driver is loaded sucessfully from a floppy disk. Later when the windows installer prompt whether to Install Windows, Repair or F3 to quit; I select install windows and it prompts unable to detect hdd.

I tried again without F6 and still the same. Rivert it back to ATA mode and the hdd will happily load into XP again.

I am using intel X25M Gen1 hdd.

Is that D630 not really supporting AHCI, or it does not support X25M on AHCI?
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post #2 of 6
8/30/09 at 1:33pm
D630 supports AHCI which "is a programming-specification which defines the operation of Serial ATA host-controllers".

XP does not really support AHCI, but needs the SATA driver in order to be able to be installed on a SATA (X25M in this case) drive. Most XP users slip-stream the SATA driver onto an installation disk, thus doing away with floppy.

Funny noting your remark about SATA ;-)

cheers ...
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post #3 of 6
8/30/09 at 10:45pm
Thread Starter 
Thanks for the reply. I think i will stick on ATA mode on XP.

I am just curios why the hdd is not detected even with F6 + ICH8M driver loaded. I not yet try with regular hdd anyway. Will try later and see how it goes.
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post #4 of 6
8/31/09 at 12:49am
I have found you have to try several different drivers, but one of them should work when you use F6 + the driver.
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post #5 of 6
9/2/09 at 6:30am
Thread Starter 
I got it work finally, but using the driver provided in dell d630 website. Earlier i was using the latest intel 8.9 driver, and i think i may have extracted the wrong file. After installing XP i install the latest intel 8.9 driver and it is working, cache enabled.

However the hdd performance on D630 is not the same as desktop PC. Using hdd tunes, the D630 is doing like 170mb/s read, while on PC is 230mb/s read. Both tested new after hdderase. Random read also far below PC, close to 50% lower. Not sure if that is the hdd controller difference between ICH8M & ICH10R.
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post #6 of 6
9/2/09 at 9:20am
You will rarely if ever find a laptop that equals a simualrly configured desktop in in terms of performance laptop motherboards usually tend to bottleneck due to chipset limitations.

There is a price to pay for the small size and low power usage
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