I am looking for an Intel RST driver for my 2015 iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, late 2015) to run Windows 7. I’ve done a lot of research and testing and believe I can’t boot because I don’t have a working RST driver.
I have tried modifying an RST driver and adding a wildcard for the 8086-A102 AHCI chipsets and booting Windows without driver signature enforcement, but got a blue screen with error 0x0000007e
I tried multiple v15 drivers and none of them worked, all resulted in the 0x7e BSOD. I enabled Kernel-Debug mode and verbose boot mode in EasyBCD to see if the driver was loading and it indeed is. I’m not sure what to try now. I have the AppleSSD driver from the Boot Camp driver package installed but I don’t think it makes a difference. I’ve also checked for some kind of AHCI controller driver in the package and none are included.
Are there any mods to port Windows 8’s stock AHCI drivers to Windows 7? Windows 8 is supported on this system. I’ve heard of Windows 8 ACPI.sys ports, but I’m not sure if the same can be done with AHCI drivers…
Edit: Nevermind, I thought the acpi.sys mods were ports from Windows 8, but they’re just mods
These drivers are not “specific” for Windows 7 and Sunrise Point PCH, they do support W7 by Intel design, they are not MOD ones (Offered by Fernando as an option on same linked threads).
What type of disk are you using for W7? Is it bootcamp or clean OS installation? Partition or disk?
Is it a cloned OS?
I’m using the stock Apple SSD that came with this Mac (reports as a Samsung SM951 PCIe SSD, device type SATA3 in AIDA64) and it’s a clean OS installation, not cloned. Formatted the entire disk when installing.
That’s the AHCI PCIe SM951 version from SEC, perfect supported in those drivers.
So, upon Windows Setup, he asks for a disk controller, you give it to him and when does it BSOD?
I didn’t use the Windows 7 installer to install Windows, I used a Windows 10 installer and swapped install.wim, so the drive appeared without loading additional drivers. The BSOD only happens when I try to boot Windows normally, after the logo starts playing. In verbose mode, it happens after the “Loading Windows files” screen.
How did you get your conclusion that this is AHCI driver related? Does Windows even starts in Safe Mode? There’s a lot of devices in iMac that require a different driver from general ones on Windows, for same hw device… usually these are Apple modified drivers from the Bootcamp package and may Bootcamp drivers from W8 are the same/work in W7.
I assumed it was AHCI driver related because it started happening after I installed the Intel RST drivers and disabled driver signature enforcement. Windows doesn’t start in safe mode, it stops at the “amd_xata.sys” driver and returns back to the “Windows failed to start” screen if I press enter twice.
That’s a “side” storage driver loaded by default… it’s not direct used by your system chipset but is loaded anyway by default on windows OS…this could be disable if the system could boot in Safe Mode.
Does the system have an AMD dGPU also?
Also…if you installed Intel RST means that there was a point that the system was booting fine W7!!!
There’s a lot of reported BSOD errors when installing W7/10 and AMD GPU’s…suggesting switching to Apple Bootcamp drivers… i was never a fan of Windows on Mac systems, it’s better to ask in MacRumors, i won’t be able to help more on this, good luck.
Form what i read a bit…was not “entirely” related to the display driver itself, more from the drivers of the package…you need to research a bit more, but this is a specific W7 on Mac system issue and not standard Intel ACHI driver i believe, my PoV only…
