AHCI and RAID on HP Compaq Elite 8000, 8100, and 8200 Business PCs

Software Drivers

AHCI Driver

In addition to setting the SATA emulation mode of AHCI or RAID in F10 Setup

(See

BIOS Interface section for more information), an AHCI driver is required

for AHCI support.

The Windows Vista™ or Windows 7 image that ships with the HP Elite 8000-

series Business PC has the Intel AHCI driver (iastor.sys) pre-loaded. The system can

be freely switched between IDE to AHCI.

Note

In order to reuse a hard drive from a RAID configuration in

AHCI mode, it is necessary to remove RAID metadata

from the drive. This can be accomplished using low level

system format or Option ROM interface.

For customers who do not use the pre-installed HP image, there are several

scenarios for using AHCI:

New operating system installation

A fresh installation of Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7, while in AHCI mode, is

the most straightforward way of installing the AHCI driver.

Windows XP requires adding the Intel AHCI driver with the F6 option during

installation. Windows Vista and Windows 7 has native AHCI support, so either the

native AHCI driver will be used or the Intel AHCI driver can be added.

An existing Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 image using the native AHCI driver

can be updated to use the Intel AHCI driver (iastor.sys). The driver can be

downloaded from

www.hp.com.

Enhancing existing Vista or Windows 7 images from IDE mode or

native AHCI mode

Vista and Windows 7 have a native AHCI driver. If Vista or Windows 7 was

installed while in IDE mode, a registry change will allow users to gracefully switch

to AHCI mode using the Microsoft driver. See the Microsoft Knowledge Base Article

http://support.micorsoft.com/kb/922976/en-us

Corporate IT may be able to update an existing Vista or Windows 7 image that

was created in IDE mode to use the Intel AHCI driver. The process requires inserting

the Intel AHCI drivers into the image in a pre-installation environment using the

appropriate OS Tools.

Required software to insert the Intel AHCI driver:

• Windows Preinstallation Environment (WinPE) CD

• Windows OPK (OEM Preinstallation Kit) CD

• PKGMGR.EXE (Package Manager)