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    17r3 replacing HDD with SSD Help!!

    Discussion in '2015+ Alienware 13 / 15 / 17' started by dodgehemi0, Sep 9, 2016.

  1. dodgehemi0

    dodgehemi0 Notebook Evangelist

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    Ok I have the Alienware 17r3 with the m.2 as the boot drive and I had a HDD for storage. Well I had a 900gig SSD and replaced the storage 1t HDD with it after I got it. Now since I updated the bios my storage SSD is gone in BIOS and Windows. For my laptop to work it has to be in AHCI mode and no second SSD is detected. When I place it in raid then the second SSD shows up but windows will not load say "in accessible boot drive". I've tried the disable secure boot and Windows will not load. I tried the legacy mode and Windows will not load. The only bios setup that starts Windows is in AHCI and secure boot. I've searched and can't seem to find an answer. Any help would be much appreciated. Oh and dell tech support is useless!


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    dodgehemi0, Sep 9, 2016
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  2. dodgehemi0

    dodgehemi0 Notebook Evangelist

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    No one?


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    dodgehemi0, Sep 10, 2016
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  3. fiziks

    fiziks Notebook Evangelist

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    I can't speak for Win 10, but in Win 7, to switch between RAID and AHCI you had to reinstall the OS on your boot drive, because that's when the RAID or AHCI HD controller driver is installed.

    What happens is you boot into BIOS and switch from AHCI to RAID mode and things seem to go fine but once the AHCI HD controller driver is loaded it sees you aren't in AHCI mode and you get the message. Safe mode still has to load the HD controller driver, so same error happens in safe mode (I think, been a while since I went through this). Same thing happens for going from RAID to AHCI. Windows doesn't consult the BIOS to determine which driver to load. It simply loads the last driver that was in use. New hardware detection happens later in the boot process, but you never get later in the boot process because the wrong HD controller driver got loaded.
     
    fiziks, Oct 18, 2016
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