Question Botched Switch From RAID To AHCI

[Immitem]

Hi there. A tutorial I once (successfully) followed to switch from RAID to AHCI, on another computer, failed on my Dell Precision 7730 with a copy of Windows 10 already installed.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ngnIKqPOc4


Basically, I wanted to dual boot W10 and CentOS but in RAID mode that would not work as the Linux installer could not see the drives. The problem is that I got stuck in a boot loop until I am brought to the recovery screen, and my Windows 10 usb drive could not see the O.S. already installed in order to try and repair it. All of the options I have selected in the recovery menu have had no effect and often just trigger another restart back to the recovery menu. Switching back from AHCI to RAID solves nothing. I also attempted to reset my BIOS settings to no effect. Switching back to AHCI I installed another copy of W10 on the drive I originally intended to install Linux on and it all worked smoothly but I have a tonne of settings and licensed software on the original installation that I cannot recover. I also tried using the command prompt to rebuild the BCD but without the W10 installation detected I do not know how to procede.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks!

 

[velocityg4]

When you boot off the clean Windows 10 installation you just made. Does the old Windows drive show up in Computer?

Did you clear the old BCD file? Bootrec won't find an installation as it will see it in the record. You basically need to build the BCD from scratch.

Follow the solution in the link. Edit: Unplug the new boot drive before doing this.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...ations-0/52359f87-de4a-41dc-b0c3-cc275e1d9fbf

In the future. When I move a computer from RAID to AHCI or vice versa. I use a second SATA controller. Motherboards usually have two except cheap ones. On a cheap one I'd just use a cheap bootable PCIe SATA card.

Anyways the procedure for this is

1. Skip to step 3 if you have an two controllers already. Boot computer with new controller card plugged in but boot drive in old port still. Install the drivers.
2. Shutdown the computer.
3. Plug Windows disk to secondary controller in motherboard or PCIe card
4. Change boot option to point to new primary drive if necessary.
5. Change BIOS settings to AHCI, IDE or RAID for primary controller.
6. Boot Windows. If the driver was already installed it should boot off secondary controller.
7. Windows should detect the change to AHCI, IDE or RAID. Then install the drivers necessary for what it thinks is a new controller. Check Device Manager to see the controller is installed.
8. Shutdown
9. Change drive cables back to primary controller
10. Boot, change boot order if necessary. Windows should boot as it has the appropriate SATA drivers installed.

 

[Immitem]

Follow the solution in the link. Edit: Unplug the new boot drive before doing this.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...ations-0/52359f87-de4a-41dc-b0c3-cc275e1d9fbf

I disabled the new boot drive in the BIOS, not just removed it from the boot order. The reason being that I have a laptop with a time consuming procedure to get to the M.2 drives and still have work to do on it. I unfortunately do not have that much time to attempt the linked solution and ran into an issue.

Everything was going smoothly until I got to

attrib c:\boot\bcd -h -r -s

And got something along the lines of "path not found c:\boot". I tried a command I read elsewhere (bcdboot c:\windows /s c:) that was supposed to fix that issue in particular but no dice.

Any ideas?

 

[sbeve]

considering how late this reply is, it may not be of much help, but i ran into this problem once, and while switching back to raid didn't help the first time, it strangely worked after leaving it overnight, and trying again. maybe it required booting into the live usb and then back into windows, as that's the only thing i can remember doing before the second try that i hadn't done before the first. this won't fix the problem of needing to switch to ahci, but maybe it can help you get windows working again