I have an Asus Formula I, the BIOS version is the latest 1402. I have 2 CD-drives and 2 regular drives attached to the SATA ports.

Now I've bought the Crucial CT256M4SD1 and want to use it as boot drive but there is a bunch of issues with that:

When I switch the board from legacy to AHCI the system gets stuck when it tries to detect the drives. Same as here (not my photo but same board and issue) ![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/EEmvi.jpg)

I have to unplug all drives except the CD and SSD then, reboot, change to IDE, plug the old drives in and it will boot again. I figured out that my 1tb WD hard drive seems to cause that issue. But when I try to boot without it im getting stuck at the point where the system should boot from the CD drive or the hard drive. But instead it just gets stuck and shows a cursor.

I have already disabled the Jmicron RAID controller on board. I am not using the RAID controller and never did before.

So, how can I get the system booting with all drives I have but using AHCI and booting into the systems bootloader? I've already wasted hours on that.

Edit: 

So far I figured out that this happens very likely because the BIOS or Controller is for some reason not able to read my partition table properly and the BIOS hangs because of this when detecting the drive. But I have no Idea how to fix that without deleting the partition table and reformat the whole drive. I do not want to do that, I would have to buy another drive before to backup what is on this drive.

Edit2: 

Look at [this thread](http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itproinstall/thread/0185fced-0564-412f-8e10-bec37d020c81), this is an excerpt from it:

> 
> the problem is in disk geometry detection in AHCI mode. for example:
> 
> 
> 1. get empty disk. check didk geometry with system info. you will see Tracks/Cylinder = 255, Sectors/Track = 63. Create 100MB NTFS partition
>  with Windows Disk Manager. Reboot. Check disk geometry - it changes!
> 2. Why disk geometry changed? because BIOS thinked that partition end is aligned to end of cylinder. So it uses END CHS value for first
>  partition and LBA END for counting new geometry. In my case I saw the
>  following
> 
> 
> record in master boot record. END CHS = DF 13 0C (END HEAD = 0xDF)
>  Disk Geometry Tracks/Cylinder chaged after reboot from 255 to 224. 224
>  = 0xE0 = 0xDF + 1
> 
> 
> As you can see DISK GEOMETRY IS DETERMINED BY END CHS VALUE FOR 1ST
>  PARTITON
> 
> 
> 3. Now imaging the following you again get empty disk with geometry 255/63. Create partition with size 101MB or 352MB or 705MB or there
>  are pretty much other sizes. These sizes are specific - after creating
>  partition with this size you will get ZERO in end chs for 1st
>  partition. Reboot now - and you will see that bios hangs - cause disk
>  must have positive Tracks/Cylinder.
> 
> 
> How to fix this?
>  -DO NOT USE AHCI or -use large 1st partitions more than 8GB (end chs for such partition always FE FF FF).
> 
> 
> 

I've already resized the partition to take more than 8gb but it does not work. The follow up post in the thread on technet verifies that too. So to what it comes down is that I have to fix my disk geometry to a flavor that the BIOS will like or get a 2nd disk of the same size and temporary copy my data to another drive, reformat and copy it back. I really would like to avoid that time consuming process.