Question Wanting to change from RAID to AHCI - no bootable device found

[MikeHersee]

Hi,
I have a Gigabyte A320-S2H-V2 motherboard with the latest bios (updated recently) and Windows 11 was initially installed as RAID with two mirrored drives. Unfortunately it lost synchronisation, probably partly because I was using Green drives which I found are not suitable for RAID and I ended up removing one drive. So it has been running with one drive in a RAID mirrored configuration but with only one drive, which is not mirrored in reality of course.

I want to change to AHCI as it runs like a dog because of disk activity and I suspect it will be faster. I have read various guides on how to do it, which involve setting to reboot into safe mode, setting the UEFI to AHCI instead of RAID, and then when windows has booted, changing the windows boot configuration back to normal. However, when I go into my UEFI and change 'RAID' to 'AHCI' it says 'no bootable devices found', even though the hard drive is listed on SATA port 0 and doing a save and restart simply gets it to boot straight back into UEFI. The only way I can get it to try to boot into windows is by setting it back to 'RAID'.

I've seen some older advice that says to set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\msahci - Start to '0', to get it to load the AHCI drivers but this doesn't exist, and then later advice that says msahci has been changed to Storahci. I have storahci, but 'start' is already set to '0'. I don't seem to be finding anything else that addresses the issue of it not even finding the drive when you change the motherboard from RAID to AHCI. This is where I'm stuck.

If I do SC QC STORAHCI in CMD I get
[SC] QueryServiceConfig SUCCESS

SERVICE_NAME: storahci
TYPE : 1 KERNEL_DRIVER
START_TYPE : 3 DEMAND_START
ERROR_CONTROL : 3 CRITICAL
BINARY_PATH_NAME : \SystemRoot\System32\drivers\storahci.sys
LOAD_ORDER_GROUP : SCSI Miniport
TAG : 32
DISPLAY_NAME : Microsoft Standard SATA AHCI Driver
DEPENDENCIES :
SERVICE_START_NAME :

I've tried sc config storahci start= boot from CMD when run as administrator and I get 'ChangeServiceconfig SUCCESS', but back in UEFI when I change from RAID to AHCI it just reboots directly back into UEFI and in Easy tune mode says, "No bootable devices found'.

I don't know where to go from here. Any insights greatly appreciated.

 

[USAFRet]

I have a Gigabyte A320-S2H-V2 motherboard with the latest bios (updated recently) and Windows 11 was initially installed as RAID with two mirrored drives. Unfortunately it lost synchronisation, probably partly because I was using Green drives which I found are not suitable for RAID and I ended up removing one drive. So it has been running with one drive in a RAID mirrored configuration but with only one drive, which is not mirrored in reality of course.

I want to change to AHCI as it runs like a dog because of disk activity and I suspect it will be faster.

About here is where I would just give up, and start over with a full OS reinstall. And everything else.

And NOT with a WD Green HDD as the OS drive. It is hard to think of a worse optionl

 

[MikeHersee]

About here is where I would just give up, and start over with a full OS reinstall. And everything else.

And NOT with a WD Green HDD as the OS drive. It is hard to think of a worse optionl

Well.... I have an important deadline approaching in a month with a lot of work to do between now and then so don't want to reinstall and start from scratch, and at the moment I'm not in a position to buy a 2TB SSD and green drives are what I've got - and they've been incredibly reliable, even if they're slow. But there has got to be a technical reason why the motherboard thinks it's not possible to boot with the drive in AHCI mode when everyone else thinks that's the way to do it. How do I tell what's missing, or why the motherboard thinks the drink is not AHCI compatible?

 

[USAFRet]

Well.... I have an important deadline approaching in a month with a lot of work to do between now and then so don't want to reinstall and start from scratch, and at the moment I'm not in a position to buy a 2TB SSD and green drives are what I've got - and they've been incredibly reliable, even if they're slow. But there has got to be a technical reason why the motherboard thinks it's not possible to boot with the drive in AHCI mode when everyone else thinks that's the way to do it. How do I tell what's missing, or why the motherboard thinks the drink is not AHCI compatible?

Is the data here backed up anywhere? A second/third copy?

Or is this the only copy of whatever?

 

[MikeHersee]

I have a fresh backup

Is the data here backed up anywhere? A second/third copy?

Or is this the only copy of whatever?

I have a fresh backup

 

[BFG-9000]

If you want to continue using the one drive but in a non-degraded state you have to enter the RAID bios utility to change from mirrored to a single-drive RAID "array." That may not even be supported and depends on your BIOS.

If you want to reinstall using AHCI you have to first enter the RAID bios utility to remove the disk as a member of an array. May as well do that for both disks so they will both be usable non-RAID.

In Legacy BIOS mode this is under "Press <Ctrl-F> to enter RAID Option ROM Utility" after POST. Otherwise it's the
Peripherals\RAIDXpert2 Configuration Utility submenu in the UEFI.