|
01.25.10
Successfully Upgrading Your RAID Drivers In Windows 7
 By
Mike Kavis
I just spent the better half of the day upgrading my son's Dell 1721 laptop from Vista to Windows 7. I have done my share of Linux installs and upgrades on all kinds of hardware configurations but this was one of the toughest I have ever been through. Once I resolved it, the fix is rather easy, but finding the fix was a challenge. I am thankful for the many people who post useful information in forums so that people like me can resolve our problems. Hopefully this post will help some folks and save them a great deal of time and frustration.
The Problem
When upgrading from Vista to Windows 7, I received an error message that I needed to update my driver for my ATI AHCI Raid controller. So I went to the device manager and clicked on upgrade driver. Windows told me that it was up to date already. Keep in mind that the install process would run for 15-20 minutes each time before it would tell me what the issue was (grrrrr). I had a number of other issues reported initially which required me to uninstall certain software modules. Each time I complied, the install process would run for another 15-20 minutes to tell me about the next problem. When I finally got to the driver problem, I was stuck. No matter what I tried I could not update the driver. I finally found a discussion thread in a forum that led me to the solution. It is a long back and forth thread so I will spare you the details, instead I will show you how to resolve the issue below.
The Solution
The way to resolve the driver issue is to manually copy the new driver over the old driver in the appropriate folder and DO NOT REBOOT! Rebooting was the culprit which for some reason would bring back the old .sys file. So here are the steps.
• Download the RAID Driver here. Make sure you download the RAID driver and not one of the other drivers.
• Run the setup program for the RAID driver (9-12_win7_32-64_raid.exe)
• Locate the driver (.sys file) by going here ->C:\ATI\Support\9-12_vista32-64_raid\Packages\Drivers\SBDrv\SB7xx\RAID\LH
• Copy the driver (ahcix86s.sys)
• Go to C:\windows\system32\drivers and backup the driver ahcix86s.sys (likely has a 2007 date)
• Paste new driver (ahcix86s) into this folder (should now have a 2009 date)
• DO NOT REBOOT
• Run Windows 7 installer
That's it! It took me several hours to find all of this information and successfully implement this solution. I hope this helps somebody and saves several hours.
One last note: For all you Microsoft fanboys who bash Linux, this Windows 7 upgrade was a complete pain in the ass and was much harder than most Linux installs I have ever worked on. I even had to recover a Mac once and found it easier to resolve than this. Anyhow, good luck to those who are reading this and looking for a solution!
UPDATE:
After following the steps above, the Windows 7 upgrade went through its process. It requires a reboot several times. For some reason I kept getting an error that it could not find a rebootable partition. So every time it rebooted I had to press F12 and tell it to boot from the RAID drive. Then it would continue the upgrade process. I do not know if this issue is related to any of the steps above.
UPDATE 2:
The "no rebootable partition" issue was caused by the fact that I left a thumb drive in a USB port which I used to back up some of my files. It was not related to any of the above mentioned steps!
Comments
About the Author:
Mike Kavis is a veteran Chief Architect with over 23 years of IT experience including distributed computing, SOA, BPM, data warehouse, business intelligence, and enterprise architecture. Read Mike's blog at Enterprise Initiatives.
|
WindowsDailyNews is brought to you by: