AHCi woes on Vista

[madnoh]

Hi everyone. I got my system all set up for triple booting (kindly refer to my sig below) using a single SATA drive. All 3 OSes seemed happy with it. The drive controller was set to AHCI mode before anything was installed and I used the driver in the floppy (duh, Intel) when I installed Vista Ultimate.

 

Now, everything's fine and dandy until I plugged in another SATA drive which I formatted to FAT32 so all 3 OSes can access it. Ubuntu says "fine", OS X says "cool" but Vista can't even boot. The boot process will stall for a bit and just reboots. I'm sure the 2nd drive was causing this because when I unplug the 2nd SATA connector, Vista boots up just fine.

 

In the Device Manager, it says I have the Intel ICH9 SATA AHCI controller installed. I fired up the Intel Matrix Storage Manager console ver 7.5 and everything seems okay. Since wikipedia said hot-plugging is possible I plugged in the 2nd drive and clicked rescan on the Storage Manager console and boom. BSOD.

 

 

First drive's a Seagate 250GB SATA2 but the second one's an older Maxtor 200Gb SATA. Perhaps I should use all SATA2 drives? Of the same make? And capacity? There isn't much documentation around the web on this.

 

Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong? I appreciate any feedback. Cheers.

[madnoh]

I found out that the Maxtor drive was the problem. Tried a 40Gb WD SATA drive and all is well.

 

Not sure what was wrong with the Maxtor, though. I attached it as a USB drive and Vista sees it. Even formatting and running chkdsk went without a hitch.

 

It's one of those things, I guess.