I have need to add an external hard drive to my Dell 8930 XPS pc. I've tried but my Windows 10 Pro "sees" the drive and assigns it a drive letter but it does not show up in Drive Management and if I click on the drive Windows spins its wheels on something and never finishes. I have two other PC's with Windows 10 Pro but they are not UEFI Secure Boot and SATA set to RAID. Their setting is AHCI. The external drive works fine on them. What is the proper procedure for switching the Bios setting from RAID to AHCI on this new PC? That is the setting the new PC was shipped with. As far as I can tell Raid is not really being used. My pc has a PCIE NvME m-2 boot drive and a 2tb hdd. Any help someone can offer would be greatly appreciated.
How to properly switch SATA from RAID to AHCI on UEFI Secure Boot PC
- Thread starter 52Yankee
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Well, an external USB drive does not depend on the internal controllers. Many Dell systems are shipped with a NVMe drives using the Intel controller, which is why the SATA controller is set to RAID. That controller has been improved and the performance is close to using the NVMe controller, but if you want to switch, use the procedure below.
Use Msconfig.exe to set your system to boot into Safe Mode.
Reboot and go into the Bios and change the SATA controller to AHCI.
Save the Bios changes and allow the system to reboot into Safe Mode. While in Safe Mode, use Msconfig.exe again and change back to a normal boot.
Allow the system to reboot and you should be on the NVMe controller.
If something goes wrong, switch the Bios SATA controller back to RAID.
Use Msconfig.exe to set your system to boot into Safe Mode.
Reboot and go into the Bios and change the SATA controller to AHCI.
Save the Bios changes and allow the system to reboot into Safe Mode. While in Safe Mode, use Msconfig.exe again and change back to a normal boot.
Allow the system to reboot and you should be on the NVMe controller.
If something goes wrong, switch the Bios SATA controller back to RAID.
It is a WD 500g Sata Drive
I have tried different ports. Results are the same.
Drivers should be up to date. This pc is new OCT 2018 from Dell and all Windows updates are applied.
The drive in the same enclosure works beautifully on the W7Pro pc I am retiring.
In the event log there are a lot of entries with the yellow triangle when I use this external disk. They indicate things like I/O to logical block device retried and device reset etc.
I have tried different ports. Results are the same.
Drivers should be up to date. This pc is new OCT 2018 from Dell and all Windows updates are applied.
The drive in the same enclosure works beautifully on the W7Pro pc I am retiring.
In the event log there are a lot of entries with the yellow triangle when I use this external disk. They indicate things like I/O to logical block device retried and device reset etc.
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I suppose all I could suggest is first to look for firmware updates for the drive. Then, if it still doesn't work, move all the data off the drive and use Win 10 to set it up. If it is using some type of OEM software to access it, that might be involved in the problem.