Either no DVD drive or inaccessible boot device

Antarctica wrote: I have a Mainboard "AsRock H97M Pro4", with a Samsung 850 SSD and a TSST Corp DVD burner connected to SATA. Due to the longevity and durability of my old Windows 7 installation from 2010, updated to Windows 10 and then through all upgrades, and moved from disk to disk (and the disk from mainboard to mainboard) so as not to lose all my configurations and programs, I am still running my SATA ports in IDE mode in UEFI. However, with that very mainboard, in IDE mode, the DVD burner is detected only intermittently, most of the time it is not shown in the UEFI's storage list, is not detected by Windows and not shown in devmgmt.msc at all. The mainboard has already been updated to the most recent UEFI firmware (2.10), which does not fix this problem. If I switch over to AHCI mode, the DVD drive is detected reliably in UEFI but Windows quits with INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE error. I have tested a different DVD drive (LG) on a different cable already, which does exhibit the same behaviour, so I would rule out a problem with the drive or the cable. The SSD is always detected reliably in both IDE and AHCI mode. Is there any possibility to fix either error, except a full Windows reinstall, so that I can use my Windows 10 with my DVD burner?

Your problem changing from IDE mode to AHCI mode has nothing to do with your hardware.

The problem is a known situation with Windows, of any version.

While you can easily change the SATA mode in the UEFI from IDE to AHCI, that change is not communicated to Windows.

When the PC then tries to boot Windows in AHCI mode, it expects an AHCI device and AHCI driver to be installed and ready in Windows, but that does not exist. That's why you get the INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE error.

Windows also does not "know" that it needs to install its built in AHCI driver, which is really the main and only problem, since your board's chipset supports AHCI. BTW, this issue is not related to your mother board, but simply because you originally installed Windows 7 in IDE mode. It was waiting to happen if and when you tried to change the SATA mode. It was also a shame to be using an SSD in IDE mode, that crippled its performance potential compared to AHCI mode.

Fortunately, there is a fix for this, but it takes an edit of the Windows registry that will then cause Windows to load its AHCI driver.

The general procedure is:

Boot the PC in IDE mode.

Perform the registry edit.

Restart the PC and go immediately into the UEFI. Change the SATA mode to AHCI. Save and Exit the UEFI, and Windows should boot fine.

Instead of me writing up how to do the registry edit, simply enter this text into your Google, Yahoo, or whatever search engine you use:

windows change ide to ahci

You can then choose from any of the guides you prefer about performing the registry edit.

For example: