ECS GF8200A with AHCI on Windows XP? Yes we can!
For the Google’s sake, I’m gonna try to make this post in english in order to help more people, but I know that my english sux…
So, on my recent upgrade I got an ECS GF8200A motherboard, which have 5 sata slots (I have 3 HDD sata, 1 DVD-RW sata and 1 DVD-RW IDE).
First I tried to use the new Windows 7, but since I am too used with the old XP (+ the random crashes that 7 give), I decided to go back to XP.
But, unfortunately my first attempt to install XP have failed, because the XP installer giva an error that it couldn’t find any hard disks… so I tried to configure in the bios the sata port as sata (instead of AHCI, that I was using on Win7).
The installation went ok, but after it finished, I notice that one of my drives was missing… and was the one on sata port 4. After this, I remembered that in the manual, it says that the ports 4 and 5 of sata are only AHCI or RAID… if I try to set as AHCI after the windows install, I only get BSOD with an error 0×00000000007B… so to make it work I really need to install the AHCI driver on my XP.
After lots of Google searching (with a crappy internet connection), I have found no solution directly for this motherboard. I found several questions, but almost none with answers…
Most of the replys to people with the problem was “set the bios to sata instead of AHCI”, but that way I lose 2 sata ports that I need… or “download the floppy driver for the manufacturer and do an F6 during install”. Since there’s no floppy here I couldn’t try it.
But one forum topic says it was possible to use XP with that board, since he managed to install using a custom Windows installer “Colossus” (in spanish).
Since it was possible, there’s a way: use nLite to rebuild the installer CD with the additional drivers and then install.
Ok, now let’s download the drivers!
After going to the ECS website and downloading the SATA/RAID drivers to see if it works… I made an nLited disk with the drivers and then the installer got BSOD… no lucky here.
Then after lot’s of searching again with no lucky, I got to Softpedia.com and searched for AHCI drivers and found a driver from Gigabyte that says “MCP78″ on filename, just like the drivers from ECS.
[ UPDATE]The driver can also be found on the mobo’s drivers CD, on the folder X:\RAID\AHCI\. I don’t know why I couldn’t find the last time… thanks to Bozohero for the heads-up.[ /UPDATE]
So I tried to make another nLited disc with this driver from Gigabyte and it worked! Now I’m writing this from my XP install with all my HDD/DVD drives working, with AHCI enabled on the bios!
Now, for the tl;dr:
If you want to use the ECS motherboard GF8200A with Windows XP, with all SATA ports working on AHCI mode, you need to:
Download nLite and install it;
Put your Windows XP CD installer and run nLite;
When asked what to add to the disk, select “Drivers”;
Download the drivers from the Gigabyte motherboard (download both “motherboard_driver_ahci_nvidia_mcp78_bootdisk_32bit-1.exe” and “motherboard_driver_ahci_nvidia_mcp78_bootdisk_32bit-2.exe”)
[ UPDATE]The driver can also be found on the mobo’s drivers CD, on the folder X:\RAID\AHCI\. I don’t know why I couldn’t find the last time… thanks to Bozohero for the heads-up.[ /UPDATE]
Extract both files to the same folder, then in nLite, select the “NVGTS.INF” and proceed with the operations.
After finished, burn the disc and try to install the Windows.
It worked here! ;D
Offtopic:
Duas perdas recentes aconteceram. =(
Ontem de manhã minha tia Rosa faleceu.
E de noite faleceu tio Frazio, que também era meu padrinho.
Que ambos possam descansar em paz ali no céu. This is a sad day…
![[Image]](http://img185.imageshack.us/img185/5893/57556.jpg)



