I am owner of mainboard with INTEL P67 chipset and i'm spending weeks already trying to solve UNPLEASANT issue with intel AHCI drivers for windows XP....
PROBLEM:
Under latest XP SP3 prof. with intel AHCI driver installed the SATA ports 1 to 5 with attached HDD >2TB behaves very strange.
Drives are detected in device manager, but no drive letters are assigned (cannot read drive in event viewer)!!!
When using `hot plug` feature of AHCI and connecting the HDD after OS startup, the drive is detected, drive letter assigned and drive looks fine.
I can accept even this behaviour, but in this condition write performance is about 1/5 and even this after writing few GB drops to 1MB and causes stability issues (blue screens etc.)
THIS DOESN'T HAPPEN IF THE DRIVE IS CONNECTED TO SATA0 PORT - this port is 100% functional, but i have two DATA >2TB HDDs so i can't use them both together.
SUSPICIONS:
-hardware and BIOS should be fine, because everything works great under W7 (both modes) or under WXP in SATA mode with build in microsoft driver used... with different types of hardrives the behavior is the same, so it isn't HDD caused issue.
-to use >2TB HDD with XP i need 3rd party software, i tried more of them (acronis, paragon...) and it doesn't help (same behavior)
-i tried more version of intel AHCI driver for XP (from last 11.2.0.1006 to old 10.1.0.1008), and the behavior is the same
-i tried other versions of XP OS if it isn't problem here
-i tried some registry tweaks mostly associated with AHCI power managment and nothing helps
->>> so it looks sure like strange DRIVER ISSUE (prove me if i'm wrong), even stranger because SATA0 port is fine