Problem with turning AHCI mode on in BIOS w/ ASROCK 970 Extreme 4

[MBright8950]

Having problems turning AHCI mode in BIOS from IDE. My OS in on one of two SSDs and I also have a 1Tb mechanical drive. The problem is when I switch to AHCI and save BIOS i get the Windows Startup screen and then bam BSOD followed by a restart to BIOS. I know Im still getting better speeds but now that I have two SSDs I want the best performance I can get. I was thinking of doing a fresh OS install and try again but I dont know what I could have done different. I know its not the drive because I had it in an older build before it worked fine with AHCI turned on. I appreciate any feedback. Thanks.

ASROCK 970 Extreme AM3+ Mobo
(2) 120 GB Agility 3s
FX-6300 @ 4.2 ghz
8 GB RAM
GTX 660 SC
Win 7 Ult

 

[John Floyd]

You have 2 options there is a registry edit you must do first before turning on ahci, because you already have windows installed
Or the easiest safe bet way is to just re install windows with ahci on and that will 100% fix your problem. If you dont want to re install i can try to find the guide for the reg edit for yea.

 

[TonyRoma]

Basically, change the following registry key to 0:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\services\msahci\Start

Restart the computer once (without changing any BIOS settings) and Windows will load default AHCI drivers. You may not notice anything happening, so let Windows sit for a minute or two after reboot to give it enough time to make sure this process happened.

Restart the computer again and change the SATA operation to AHCI in BIOS. Save the BIOS settings and when Windows boots again, it should not crash with a blue screen. This time you should notice that Windows is installing new hardware, which includes several SATA AHCI components (similar to what the picture above shows). Windows will probably ask to restart once more.