Replacing a standard Hard-Disk Drive (HDD) with a Solid-State Drive (SSD) is a common task nowadays, since it's arguably the best way to revamp an old-fashioned desktop or laptop PC without spending too many bucks. The best way to do that is using freeware tools such as Macrium Reflect Free, which is a great backup, disk imaging and cloning software for commercial and personal use: these kind of tools allow you to plug your new SSD Drive using an USB adapter or a SATA port, clone your old Hard-Disk on it and then swap the two drives. The whole operations could take time, depending on the amount of data contained in your old HDD, but it's well worth it.
However, replacing your old hard drive with a new SSD Drive is not the only thing you should do, as most SSD drives require AHCI operation mode for more optimal performance or configurability: alhough this is primarily a BIOS settings, changing it there will also affect your operating system, thus requiring to re-configure it in order to make it use the AHCI drivers instead of the RAID/IDE ones. This could be quite an hard task, unless you're willing to reinstall your OS from scratch. In this post, we'll briefly explain how to do that in Windows 10 without having to reinstall.
Assuming you already made the HHD switch, with your SSD Drive installed and ready (in IDE mode), these are the steps to switch to AHCI on Windows 10:
- Open a Command Prompt with administrative rights.
- Type the following command: bcdedit /set {current} safeboot minimal
- In the unlikely scenario that this command doesn't work, use this instead: bcdedit /set safeboot minimal
- Restart the computer.
- Enter the BIOS Setup by pressing F1, F2 or the DEL key (depending on your computer settings).
- Change the SATA Operation mode from RAID (or IDE, or RAID/IDE) to AHCI.
- Save changes and exit.
- Make Windows 10 boot and load in Safe Mode.
- Open a Command Prompt with administrative rights.
- Type the following command: bcdedit /deletevalue {current} safeboot
- Again, if this command doesn't work, use this instead: bcdedit /deletevalue safeboot
- Reboot your system.
Windows 10 should now start with AHCI enabled.
