Windows 7, Detecting hard drives; Done; No drives found?

Question

I recently reinstalled windows 7 on a Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R (revision 2.0) motherboard with an SSD hard drive. I was reading about IDE vs AHCI and the consensus seemed to be that AHCI was better unless you needed to support a legacy OS.

So in the BIOS I switched the SATA channel mode from IDE to AHCI. Now since doing that windows gives a message:

"Detecting hard drives; Done; No drives found"

This is then followed by a "PCI Device Listing" and a "Verifying DMI Data Pool" message.

Then windows precedes to boot up normally (the only odd thing after starting is that the hard drive is showing in the Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media system tray item).

On the previous Windows installation, the BIOS had been set to IDE and I did not see this message. Why is it showing this message and how can I fix it?

Answer 1

By enabling SATA mode to AHCI, you enable the onboard SATA controller. Any harddrives connected through SATA (small plugs) will have to be set into a RAID configuration. In order for this to happen, you have to configure the harddrives through the RAID controller's own BIOS. This "Detecting hard rives; No drives found" is the message done by the RAID controller BIOS initialization, and is completely normal.

If you go into the SATA bios and setup a raid controller, it will find the drives there. Note that doing this will wipe the data on the disk. So if you made a complete backup and you are going to reinstall windows a next time, that might be a time to switch to a RAID configuration. The reason to do that is because it is faster.