Hey all, I have a machine with opensuse 11.1 installed. When I installed everything the AHCI option in bios was disabled. I would like to enable it now. This is because whilst I have 6 sata ports, with ACHI disabled the bios says I only have 4, but with it enabled it says I have 6. So I’d like to switch to AHCI enabled. Can I do that or do I have to reinstall the OS?
Thanks.
AHCI alters the way the controller sees the disks, I would leave it alone, or backup first then play.
I tend to be a bit short with my explanations, so here is a recent example, last week I was asked to install windows XP alongside windows 7 on a laptop, win 7 was pre-installed with the AHCI option set in the bios, to install XP I needed to change that option , then reinstall win7 so it could recognize its partition.
Yeah I know windoze has an issue with that but I believe Linux may not. Depending on the kernel though.
You should be fine.
The worst case scenario is the kernel doesnt have the driver for your hardware to run in ahci mode and wont be able to boot.
I doubt this will happen .
Are you running linux only ?
This is not to say that switching on AHCI mode will not work for you…
… but this was my experience:
Last October, I bought an Acer Aspire 1410 netbook. I tried to install openSUSE 11.1 on it when the default BIOS setting was set AHCI. The install would work fine, but upon every reboot afterward, there would be a different hard drive error. Basically, it looked as if the filesystem was corrupt. After reading some posting about other people having similar problems with Ubuntu and openSUSE, I tried their solution: use IDE mode. It worked. No random hard drives errors on boot. After a clean install with 11.2, I tried AHCI mode again. Same issue.
If you toggle back on AHCI mode and have troubles booting, you’ll know why…