No SATA Config Option in BIOS

mkmossop

Distinguished
May 17, 2016
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Unless I'm totally missing something I don't see a SATA config option when I enter BIOS. I'm on an HP laptop on Windows 10.

I'm looking for the option because I want to see if I have AHCI or RAID configured since I installed an ssd. As far as I can tell there's no way to check which you have configured without seeing in BIOS, or can I check this in windows somehow?

So how can I check this or switch if I can't find the option in BIOS?

Thanks!
 
Solution
I presume you are looking for the a place to set the SATA Mode to either "IDE or PATA Emulation", "AHCI", or "RAID", so you can verify how it is set.

First you should understand that the "IDE or PATA Emulation" option was just a work-around for use with Win XP that came out about the same time as SATA drives. Win XP never had an AHCI device driver "built in", so to use such a drive properly one had to use the "F10" option during the Win XP Install to install the required driver from a floppy disk at a "low level"; that driver became a "built-n" device driver for that custom Win XP install so that it could boot from the AHCI device. The Emulation option in BIOS Setup was a work-around for people who could not or did not want to do this...
I presume you are looking for the a place to set the SATA Mode to either "IDE or PATA Emulation", "AHCI", or "RAID", so you can verify how it is set.

First you should understand that the "IDE or PATA Emulation" option was just a work-around for use with Win XP that came out about the same time as SATA drives. Win XP never had an AHCI device driver "built in", so to use such a drive properly one had to use the "F10" option during the Win XP Install to install the required driver from a floppy disk at a "low level"; that driver became a "built-n" device driver for that custom Win XP install so that it could boot from the AHCI device. The Emulation option in BIOS Setup was a work-around for people who could not or did not want to do this. It limited the use of the SATA drive to only the IDE functions, and thus Win XP would believe it was really dealing with only a simple IDE drive type and use it own built-in driver for that type of device. However, all subsequent versions of Windows do have both IDE and AHCI device type drives "built in", so this work-around is no longer needed on newer machines likely to be running newer versions of Windows. So it is quite possible that this option never was included in you HP laptop machine.

Still, that leaves the possibility that you might choose to set up a RAID array using your internal drives. That assumes, of course, that your machine has resources for holding at least 2 HDD's, AND that your BIOS has built-in RAID capabilities. In many desktop machines, that involved three items: (a) an option to "turn on" the RAID resources by setting the SATA Port Mode in BIOS to "RAID"; (b) running the RAID management utility in BIOS to create a RAID array from the available HDD units' and (c) installing the RAID device driver under Windows. Now, many systems actually had the device drivers for RAID and for AHCI included in one driver, so that installing that driver for SATA devices automatically included the driver required for using RAID. Also remember that, just because RAID was set as an option in BIOS does NOT mean your drives are in a RAID array. You still had to use the RAID management utility to create and format the RAID array, and by default any drive NOT explicitly assigned to an array is NOT a RAID device. So MAYBE you machine has both AHCI and RAID device drivers already included and no option for the old IDE Emulation mode, so there's no need for that BIOS option. Then any HDD NOT included explicitly in a RAID array creation will still be a stand-alone AHCI device.
 
Solution