When I first installed Windows on my new system I thought how cool it was that Windows would install without needing to additional drivers at install time. It seems that the ASUS P5B-E, and I assume most other Intel P965 motherboards allow you to make your SATA hard drives look like IDE hard drives. While this seemed like a good feature to me during installation, it soon started to cause me problems later.

DISCLAIMER: Please note that even though this worked for me, if you follow the procedure described in this post you do so at your own risk. This site and myself are not responsible for any damage caused to your hardware, software, or lose of data due to you following these directions.

I first started to notice problems when I tried to burn a CD. In Nero I made coaster after coaster, and when trying to use the Windows built-in burning functionality I just got error messages. I could read CD's and DVD's just fine, but could not burn anything. When looking in the control panel I noticed that my IDE DVD-R drive showed up as a SCSI drive, and that is also when I noticed that the Intel SATA controllers were showing up as IDE controllers. So I figured there must have been a bad driver configuration somewhere down the line. I decided to re-install Windows and try and setting my BIOS to use the advanced SATA interface (ACHI) for both the Intel and JMicron SATA controllers.

The first thing I did was make my two driver floppy disks from the ASUS driver CD. These were meant to let me install the needed drivers through the F6 menu when installing Windows. But after switching everything to ACHI and trying to install WindowsXP I quickly noticed that the Windows installer would not let me use more that one Floppy. If I swapped floppy disks and tried to load more drivers it just showed the drivers from the previous disk. So I had to find a fix.

After switching back to IDE mode and booting back into my previous install of Windows I copied all the files, except for “txtsetup.oem,” from my JMicron driver disk to the Intel floppy disk. Then I opened the txtsetup.oem file on my Intel driver disk and copied and pasted segments of the JMicron version into it until I got something that looked like it might work (See the attached text file).

Then I tried again, in the BIOS I switched my Intel chipset to ACHI and my JMicron to ACHI and went to Windows install. After pressing F6 I was greeted with the standard add additional drivers page, and I put in my new custom floppy disk. I was a little surprised... it worked! There on the screen were four drivers to choose from, two for my Index ICH8R chipset, and two for my JMicron JMB363 chipset. So first I added the AHCI driver for Intel, then added the ACHI driver for JMB363. With that done I continued with the install as usual.

After booting into Windows I checked my device manager, and it now showed a single ICH8R SATA/ACHI controller, a IDE controller (from JMB363), and the JMB363 ACHI controller. My DVD-R driver how shows up as a IDE drive as it should. Burning works flawlessly and all seems right with the world.

So that is how I got my ASUS P5B-E to work with the ACHI settings enabled in the BIOS. I am sure there is an easier way to get multiple drivers into the Windows installer, but I could not find it and this was much quicker for me. :)

One big thing though. DO NOT UPDATE YOUR JMB DRIVER THROUGH WINDOWS UPDATE!! I did this and instantly I had two JMB controllers show up, and one was showing an error. Also my DVD driver vanished again. So I rolled back the driver deleted the JMB devices and re-scanned for changes. Everything went back to normal. But just remember do not update the JMB driver. Just leave it alone.

Hope this is helpful and can help someone out there with this same problem, I am sure there are a few.