Legit Reviews

I have just installed Win7 Pro with a D975XBX2 MB on a another hard drive from XP Home, so i have a dual boot system at the moment until i get win7 configured that way i want it before dumping XP ( may take months). Anyway, i have a Vantec E Z Swap that i want to be able to actually E Z swap drives. if properly configured i should be able to power the E Z swap down and the drive should disappear from MY Computer and when i put another drive in it should appear in MY Computer. Right now it doesn't do this. i have to power it down take drive out, re-start the computer and then the drive will appear. not very E Z Swap. Vantec says that i should enable AHCI in the BOIS to make this work. i have 4 SATA drives connected and have them configured as individual drives not as RAID and i want them to stay that way. I also have the eSATA on the MB enabled so i can use eSATA drives. (A) if i enable AHCI will it mess this up? (B) can i enable AHCI now that i have installed win7 or do i have to wipe it out and enable AHCI in the BIOS and then install Win7 again?
thanks.

I have the same motherboard. Your out of luck trying to change the settings after the OS is installed. If you do, it won't boot. I wish I could buy a new motherboard but the one I have won't die. All that info about AHCI and RAID is in the motherboard manual that should have come with the board. It's a real pain to get your hard drives to run with AHCI WinXP. Much easier in Win7. Make sure you have your floppy disc to install your drivers. Yea with that board you still need a floppy disc.

You can enable ACHI in the bios no problem after installing either Vista or Win7
You just need to re-enable the ACHI driver via the registry before you enable it and reboot.

I've done this just the other day, so it works.

See here
http://www.ithinkdiff.com/how-to-enable ... tallation/

After a reboot, windows will install the Microsoft ACHI driver then has to reboot yet again.
After this, go to Intel.com and download & install the latest chip set drivers again.

You cannot do this with XP.

so i will have to wait until i no longer use XP to do this? right now i am dual booting so it seems like if i do this now i won't be able to use XP anymore, is that correct?
thanks.

slickmarty wrote:so i will have to wait until i no longer use XP to do this? right now i am dual booting so it seems like if i do this now i won't be able to use XP anymore, is that correct?
thanks.

Correct, unless you want to go into the BIOS and change it to IDE mode everytime before booting into XP