[SOLVED] PC won't boot with SATA drives in AHCI mode

Jan 20, 2020
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I've just built a new pc based on a ryzen 1600af on an Asrock b450 itx motherboard. It has a brand new nvme drive for the boot drive with win10 pro on, and boots fine with just the nvme drive in the system. However, when I plug my old, existing storage drives in it refuses to boot. One is a sata SSD and one is a sata HDD. With sata set to ahci mode in bios the pc simply won't boot, it gets to the blue windows logo and hangs with the spinning balls endlessly spinning. If I change the sata mode from ahci to raid the pc boots but the drives don't show up. I can't find a similar issue via Google. I'm stumped.
 
Solution
Are you using your M2_1 or M2_2 on your board for your NVMe? You should check the manual of your motherboard because depending on where you have your NVMe plugged in some of the SATA ports might be disabled.
Jan 20, 2020
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The SSD did have win10 on it, the HDD was pure storage. Even with just the HDD it won't boot in AHCI mode, only in Raid. I've since formatted the SDD from within UEFI but i haven't been able to test whether that's done anything.
 
Jan 20, 2020
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I made some progress. I took out the HDD and tried working on the SSD and that booted in AHCI mode with no problems, but needed to be initialised in Disk Management which required a full format. Not ideal but not the end of the world, and it now works fine. The HDD still wouldn't boot in AHCI so i booted back into Raid mode and noticed in Device Manager that there were 2 items flagged under Storage as Raid Controllers. I found the latest raid drivers on the AMD page and installed them and both the SSD and HDD appeared in this computer. However, the 2 partitions on the HDD had no sizes assigned, and if i tried to open one it crashed the system. I then booted back into AHCI mode and both drives were there, but again the HDD wasn't accessible. Even Disk Management won't open with them in the system, it just sits on "connecting to virtual disk service", plus windows doesn't feel right either - it takes much longer to boot up and installing software takes ages too. I tried to use EaseUS to look at the partitions but it won't open. I tried another version of it and that wouldn't open. I tried Paragon Partition and that wouldn't open either. I'm now making a bootable Gparted usb stick and i'll see if that can help, although i have a feeling the drive is corrupted or dead.