It must happen to you: update a driver and have problems on your PC. They may not be detected at the time, but they do eventually appear and it is difficult to understand what is going on. The errors with AHCI drivers are almost without a doubt the worst, because in most cases they prevent the operating system from booting, so in these cases we have to switch from the proprietary driver of our onboard controller to the standard one, but how to do?
From proprietary AHCI to standard in a few easy steps
The first thing to do is definitely to make sure that our SSD or hard drive is installed in the correct controller. It’s somewhat visual on the motherboard, mainly because there are some boards that have two different controllers to increase the number of SATA.
Normally, if your motherboard does not have more than 6 SATA, it means that it only uses one controller and therefore we will only have one specific driver for it. Knowing this, we can already determine in Windows which driver to change, because otherwise we would have to change as many drivers as there are controllers and it is not a plan if they do not fail.
The first step is to open the device administrator, either from the Windows control panel or from the start button of the operating system, where we will see a structure similar to this.
Once in the device manager, we have to go to the tree structure to “IDE ATA / ATAPI controller” after which we will open it as shown in the following image.
In our case, we are talking about a Z370 motherboard, so the controller is owned by Intel and its 300 series chipset, as you can see. The next step is to replace the Intel driver with a standard Microsoft driver.
To do this we click with the mouse and its right button on the controller and select “Update the driver”, after which we will get the following window in the middle of our screen:
Among the two options available, we will choose the second: “Browse my PC for drivers”, where we will then have a new window.
Here we will choose the second available option again: “Choose from a list of drivers available on your computer.”
The correct option to select will already appear here, as Microsoft always enables the standard AHCI driver to maximize compatibility. Of course, we select it and give it to the next, after which it will be installed and replaced by Intel (in this case).
After that the issues with the driver of our hard drive or SSD should have been resolved and Windows should run normally and with maximum performance, at least on paper. It is not recommended to use this substitution technique for key drivers, i.e. it does not apply to any PC driver, because a standard driver should have a wide scope.
