how to update drivers standard sata ahci controller driver

As a curious scientist with a recovery partition as a safety net, I decided to proceed anyway. A rather scary warning informed me that this would more than likely break my existing partitions.

On my XPS I had to navigate to System Configuration > SATA Configuration and switch the radio button selection from RAID On to AHCI. One can easily change this setting in the BIOS. This is typically when the stock disk has been shipped in either IDE (for backwards compatibility purposes) or a vendor specific RAID mode, instead of the native Advanced Host Controller Interface ( AHCI) that exposes some of SATAs more advanced features.

A quick search introduced me to a problem I have not encountered before the SSD was likely configured to use a SATA controller mode that did not have a driver in the kernel of the live disk installer. This evening, I was bemused to find a Linux live disk unable to identify the storage volume on my new Dell XPS 13 laptop. For those who don’t care for the learning adventure, just skip to my guide to switch storage controller driver without wrecking Windows.

How to update drivers standard sata ahci controller driver