I found a way to enable AHCI mode without doing a factory-reinstall of the OS and without a floppy. This is the gist of it, although you may want to read some of the replies for clarification. Bottom line, don't allow Windows to search for the driver, and you need to find the driver information file IAHCI.INF (this is for AHCI and NOT RAID). For Dell owners, its on the ResourceCD, and it was also on my HD in the DRIVERS folder:
WARNING: This went smoothly for me, but I don't think it's without risks. Obviously, if you mistakenly install an incompatible driver, you could render the drive unbootable and be forced to reinstall the OS. I was at a point where I was going to do that anyway if this didn't work.
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1) go into bios and select 'RAID/ATA' option
2) install xp [not necessary if already installed]
3) boot into xp
4) go to device manager and update the ide controller that's connected to
SATA drive. make sure you force it to select
'Intel® 82801FR SATA AHCI Controller'
*note- u can get the driver from dell CD or u can download R78496.exe
from dell, but in this case, u'll need a PC with floppy to extract
the image unless u have winimage, but i'm not sure if it's gonna
extract it for u. *forget to mention that u still need to be able
to access those driver either by lan, cd/dvd reader, hardrive to
hardrive,etc....
5) make sure you don't update the driver for PATA IDE. if you do that,
you won't be able to boot back into windows regardless of which mode u
choose in bios for ide controller.
6) after u update the driver for the IDE attached to your SATA drive, windows
will ask you to reboot.
7) once reboot, go into bios before windows start and change 'RAID/ATA' to
'RAID/AHCI'
8) save and exit bios, now you should be able to boot into windows and install
intel application accelerator.
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This is part of an extended discussion of SATA drives in RAID and AHCI configurations and the problems with reinstalling the OS if you don't have a floppy drive. By the way, if you're looking to buy a new system, I definitely recommend getting the floppy drive, and I would have if I known that I was going to face these kinds of issues, but Dell (and Gateway-you can't even get an internal one on some systems), by making the stupid things optional, seems to be suggesting that it's obsolete technology that we can do without. Here's the link:
http://forums.us.dell.com/supportfor...cending&page=4