[SOLVED:
1. Lesson 1: In Win 7 at least, you can't update the SATA mode after you've installed the OS.
2. The problem and its solution are described here. In short you need to
a) use a repair disk or equivalent to roll back the OS to a restore point. IDK if the standard issue disk works. I used a 10 dollar product from RepairOS.com that did the trick.
b) manually or using a downloadable MS Fixit, update two registry entries. I also updated a third manually, based on this thread in the MS support forums. The link in #2 up top specifies two registry values to change. The MS support forum link specifies two more. But since one of those two is changed by the above-mentioned Fixit, you're only left to update one, i.e., set the value of "Start" in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi to 0. Again, not sure if this third is necessary.
c) reboot into BIOS, update the SATA mode to AHCI, continue to Windows. You'll need to reboot once more, and done.
]
Hello everybody. First off, I'm no pro, just a guy who bought an E6430 and tried to upgrade the HDD to SSD. Anyway, I swapped out the HDD for a Crucial 512GB SSD. I did a fresh install of Win 7 64 on the SSD, installed 20 drivers (in the recommended order) from Dell's website, got everything running fine, then set about seeing what additional tweaks were needed to optimize SSD performance. So I went into the BIOS and changed the SATA mode from the default (RAID?) to AHCI. Bad idea. Immediate BSOD (lasting a millisecond, so nearly impossible to see content) and inability to boot.
Tried Win Recovery but it found no issues. Reverted the BIOS setting both to RAID and (Hail Mary ) ATA, but still BSOD. Re-installed the HDD expecting that surely that would end the problem, but still BSOD. I suspect my problem was that I didn't have the proper AHCI driver installed before making the AHCI BIOS change (since I don't believe I saw one in Control Panel).
I'm bricked. What on earth did I do? Really sweating this one. I'd do a Windows re-install if I thought that would help, but I suspect it won't. Ideas?