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UIDE and AHCI support (Miscellaneous)

posted by DOSferatu, minneapolis, mn usa, 02.06.2010, 16:54

> I'm looking for a solution that works for any machine. That is, i want to
> be able to boot my DOS diagnostics disks on any machine, disable AHCI
> during config.sys processing (as described by Jack in this thread), and
> reenable just before reboot. What your suggesting would only work for me
> if i could get the CMOS settings for every model i come across, which is
> many.
understood.
I'm not so sure that it'll work as easily as you want it to though.

All of the machines I've played with that have AHCI, also have option ROMs in the mainboard BIOS which install INT 13 support so you can use HDDs in DOS, even through AHCI mode. Maybe I'm just getting lucky with the motherboards I play with.

Anyway, if you were to boot to DOS on such a machine with INT 13 supporting AHCI, and then turn AHCI off in config.sys, you're essentially going to break that INT 13 layer, and your HDD won't function anymore. The system may hang waiting for an AHCI command to complete, which never does.

If you can go without using INT 13, you may be ok, however booting to DOS does go out and query the HDD partition tables, even though you may not use the HDDs in your DOS session, so you may have difficult even booting to a floppy disk.



The good news is that I think that if AHCI were enabled in the BIOS, you wouldn't even need to re-enable it before rebooting after your DOS session. That should happen automatically when the system goes through POST again.

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