Dell Optiplex GX755 BSOD booting to BART PE disk or very slow image copying from Ghost

Just started imaging Dell Optiplex GX755s and I'm getting a BSOD booting to a Windows XP based BART PE disk and/or very slow image copying speed from Symantec Ghost running from within Dell's ImageDirect Agent. The fix below was to disable AHCI control for the internal SATA hard drive.

FIX:

1. Boot up Dell
2. Hit F2 to enter setup screen
3. Select and expand the following item:
• Drives
• SATA Operation
• Then change the default selection from AHCI to ATA.
  
  
• You may be prompted with a warning, accept the change.
  
  
• Then hit ESC and select Save/Exit, exiting the BIOS setup and saving your changes.
  
  
4. You're done!
   
   

The AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) enables the SATA hot plugging and NCQ (Native Command Queuing) features => but makes NO difference in the data rate between the controller and the drive. So there's most likely NO performance difference on your system. The exception is if you have an NCQ drive => and even then the difference in performance on a typical desktop is unlikely to be noticeable.

Hot-plugging serves no purpose on workstation since you will never hot swap the hard drive.

NCQ requires both controller and hard disk support, so unfortunately NCQ will not work on most SATA drives today but most disk manufacturers will support NCQ in the very near future. And this feature is really geared towards servers, so not much benefits again for the workstation users.