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Partition Master is an application that allows you to create, resize, copy and delete partitions without having to format your hard drives.

The Home Edition version is free and it is an excellent replacement for those paid apps that have more features, but cost money. Its only downside is that this edition doesn’t support 64-bit Windows.

Most, if not all the common needs can be satisfied with it.

Totally recommended.

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Since the introduction of ICHR8 Intel made some core improvements to the new AHCI interface for SATA devices.

If you don’t know what AHCI is, it provides better power managements features, hot-plug functionality and other enhancements to SATA devides such as hard drives and optical drives. Even some sites claim that AHCI provides more performance over standard controllers.

Intel has more information about AHCI.

If your BIOS supports it, you can turn on AHCI mode, but if you are currently running windows you can get into trouble and your current installation won’t boot.

So, if you want to turn on AHCI mode, you first need to enable the AHCI driver in Windows Vista or Windows 7  before changing it in the BIOS. Read how to enable it here.

Basically, you just need to change a registry key in order to avoid a BSOD with the message STOP 0×0000007B INACCESSABLE_BOOT_DEVICE when enabling AHCI.

Update: This instructions work for Windows 7 as well.