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Had to Switch to AHCI to Do Clean Install/Re-partition, Switch Back?
I just got an alienware 13 r3 laptop w/ win 10 pro pre-installed. The hard drive is one 500gb ssd drive. I wanted to partition the drive so that my OS was on a 140gb partition, and then the remaining volume for a media drive.
I wasn't able to shrink the original install volume down enough so I had to do a clean install. I used the media creation tool to create a bootable usb drive. The usb drive was bootable and setup would load but at the media selection page there were no drives visible.
After some research and whatnot I was able to determine that disabling Secure Boot and switching the sata mode to AHCI from RAID did the trick. I was able to re-partition and install win 10 pro.
I have turned Secure Boot back on and I got a warning when I made the change do but the system still boots fine. I haven't changed the sata mode back to RAID because I get a similar warning message and I'm not sure if it will have any effect.
Do I need to? Does it matter? Will it cause a problem? It's a laptop with one drive, does raid even matter in that situation?
This is for UEFI boot systems not legacy BIOS but it may still apply. I don't know.
Thanks for your help.