I recently got a new Dell Laptop D630 and it came with Vista Business 32-bit. Being the badass IT guy that I am, 32-bit is not enough for me. I need the memory increase that 64-bit allows. With a 32bit version of Windows, your maximum memory can only be around 3.25gb. With 64-bit, I think the limit is 128+gb.
Anyway’s, so I decided to reformat the Dell hard drive and install Vista Ultimate 64bit. The install went fine and there were no issues until the first official boot. Then I received a very fast blue screen (BSOD) with a STOP error, but was unable to read what it said.
It ended up being a problem with the AHCI driver installed from the copy of Vista Ultimate DVD I had.
I stumbled accross this forum posting:
http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1920227&SiteID=17
Which luckily had suggestions on resolving the issue.
The issue at hand is the version of msahci.sys that shipped with Vista has a bug in it (evidently). The problem we had was a D630 from Dell would work fine, but loading a MSDN copy of Vista Ultimate would BSOD. I tracked it down to the AHCI system driver located at c:\windows\system32\drivers\msahci.sys. On the Dell-supplied Vista disk the version of that file is 6.0.6000.16391. On the MSDN media it’s 6.0.6000.16386. A quick search for that file on TechNet shows that vile is now up to 6.0.6000.20544 as of KB933578.There are 4 options that I can see that you can take to resolve the problem:
- Change the SATA controller from AHCI mode to ATA mode in BIOS. You’ll get a warning that you may need to reinstall the OS but I didn’t. Try this at your own risk. My gut tells me that even if you did get a BSOD on boot from doing this that you could just change back – no harm no foul. The problem is that this setting disables the use of the Intel Turbo Cache card, if you choose to use one.
- Get version .16391 or better of msahci.sys. I copied the newer file from another machine that had Dell’s Vista Business image on it. You can also get it by downloading a KB patch from Microsoft that has the fix, like KB933578. Search TechNet on the file name for your options on patches. My guess is that this driver will be reved with SP1 for Vista as well. You simply copy the newer file ontop of the old one and reboot.
- Install the Intel Matrix Storage driver, which bypasses the Microsoft-supplied driver for AHCI connectivity. I’m sure you can find a version on Intel’s site, or you can get it from Dell’s. The version I used is v7.0.0.1020, A02. The download from Dell is R154200.exe. It will extract itself to a local directory and then you’ll need to use Device Manager to update the SATA AHCI controller (manually specify the driver location).
- This is really 3a – put the drivers from step 3 on a USB stick of floppy and install Vista from scratch. When you get to the disk setup screen click the new driver link and point to where the driver is supplied. Vista will then use the Intel driver instead of the Microsoft driver and you’ll have a 100% clean install.
I could of went the easy way out and just disabled AHCI and switched to ATA mode, and that did work. But AHCI offers performance increases that I didn’t want to miss out on. So I did as suggestion #4 says. I had to copy the drivers from Dell’s website onto a USB thumb drive, and then reinstall Vista again. This time prior to installing, I specified a driver to use BEFORE the install, and the install went great.
