AHCI and RAID on HP Elite 8100 Business PCs

Software Drivers

AHCI Driver

In addition to setting the SATA emulation mode of AHCI or RAID in F10 Setup (See BIOS Interface 5

above), an AHCI driver is required for AHCI support.

The Windows

XP, Windows Vista™ or Windows 7 image that ships with the HP Elite 8100 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. See below for enhancing Vista and Windows 7 with the

Intel 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 at http://sup-

port.microsoft.com/kb/922976/en-us.

Corporate IT may be able to update an existing Vista or Window 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)

The OPK CD is not available for general download. It must be obtained through a Microsoft authorized

distributor. PKGMGR.EXE is a tool that installs, uninstalls, configures, and updates features and packages

for Vista and Windows 7.

For more information and instructions on OPK or PKGMGR.EXE, go to http://www.microsoft.com.

The process is as follows:

1. Boot into WinPE.

2. Run PKGMGR.EXE from OPK.