5-1-2 Making a SATA RAID/AHCI Driver Diskette

(Required for AHCI and RAID Mode)

To successfully install operating system onto SATA hard drive(s) that is/are configured to RAID/AHCI mode, you need to install the SATA controller driver during the OS installation. Without the driver, the hard drive may not be recognized during the Windows setup process (Note 1) . First of all, copy the driver for the SATA controller from the motherboard driver disk to a floppy disk. For installing Windows Vista, you may directly load the SATA RAID driver from the motherboard driver disk during the OS installation process. For more details, refer to the next section, "5-1-3." See the instructions below about how to copy the driver in MS-DOS mode(Note 2). Prepare a startup disk that has CD-ROM support and a blank

formatted floppy disk.

Step 1: Insert the prepared startup disk and motherboard driver disk (e.g. the Windows XP driver disk) in your

system. Boot from the startup disk. Once at the A:\> prompt, change to your optical drive (example: D:\>). At the D:\> prompt, type the following two commands. Press <Enter> after each command (Figure 1):

cd bootdrv

menu

Step 2: When the controller menu (Figure 2) appears (Note 3), remove the startup disk and insert the blank formatted disk. Select the controller driver by pressing the corresponding letter from the menu. For example, in the menu in Figure 2, to install Windows XP (32-bit) onto your RAID drives, press <2> to select 2)NVIDIA MCP73 RAID DRIVER. Your system will then automatically zip and transfer this driver file to the floppy disk. Press <0> to exit when finished.

 

Figure 1

Figure 2

(Note 1)

For AHCI drives, installation of Windows Vista does not require you to install the SATA AHCI driver in advance during

 

the OS installation process.

 

(Note 2)

For users without a startup disk:

 

 

Use an alternative system and insert the motherboard driver disk. From your optical drive folder, double click the MENU.

 

exe file in the BootDrv folder (Figure 3).A command prompt window will open similar to that in Figure 2.

(Note 3)

The controller menus in the motherboard driver disks for Windows XP and Windows Vista may display different items.

 

 

Figure 3

 

 

 

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Gigabyte GA-73PVM-S2H user manual Making a Sata RAID/AHCI Driver Diskette, Required for Ahci and RAID Mode