Cloned my existing SSD to my new M4 128GB drive, but only one day later and will no longer boot while in AHCI mode. Does however boot in IDE mode, but of course will not perfrom well in IDE mode.. Any ideas? Just says,"disc read error hit control alt delete to restart" when attempting to boot in AHCI mode.
When you change the BIOS of some boards to AHCI or RAID, you need to reboot back to the BIOS after applying. Then find the setting called Hard Disk Boot Priority (Or similar) and move your hard drive to the top of that list. This is not the same as the 1, 2, 3 boot order option.
If that is not the issue, maybe you need to make the registry changes in IDE mode before moving to AHCI mode? Odd if this is the issue because it shouldn't work a few times then not, but anyway, here are the changes you need to make in IDE mode in the registry before setting AHCI in the BIOS. This applied to Intel based boards, and NOT X79
Enable switching between all IDE/AHCI/RAID modes by changing "Start" Values in these keys to 0 (Win 7 / Vista ONLY) - NOT X79 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci\Start HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Pciide\Start HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\iaStorV\Start
Then once you do that reboot windows and set AHCI in the BIOS, then reboot back to the BIOS and check your hard disk boot priority as mentioned above, then load windows again.
Once you are in windows, update to the latest Intel drivers here in the third link. Again this is only if you have an Intel board
Figured out the problem, needed to completely clear the CMOS, luckily I have a board where I can do this with a button instead of having to remove the battery.
Previous drive was installed in AHCI mode so had nothing to do with the registry.
Thanks for the help, I hope this might help someone else someday as well, took me forever to figure it out.
And turns out there was nothing wrong with the SSD I was replacing, other than the fact that's it's not a Sata 3!
