Successfully Switching Ssd To Ahci Post-install

This is technically a software and hardware question, but I figured it was more hardware. It's also lengthy, so apologies ahead of time... Just trying to be as thorough as possible with the info I'm providing.

Board: Gigabyte GA-Z68AP-D3
BIOS: Award F8
OS: Win7 64bit

A few months back I installed a new SSD in my system, and cloned my Win7 install to it from the previous HDD. As far as I could tell the process went fine, except I noticed some odd performance hiccups here and there like micro-stutters if I had a browser open alongside other programs.

Fast-forward to yesterday when I discovered that cloning Windows apparently didn't register the drive in AHCI mode, so it's been using IDE. That's confirmed by checking in AS SSD as seeing the "pciide-BAD" note on the drive. I did a bunch of research yesterday and saw that setting up AHCI at the time on install is the proper way to do it, but I also came across threads like this that gave instructions on how to do it after the fact.

I was able to make the registry changes, reboot, change to AHCI in the bios, and boot into Windows, but when the "installing drivers" popup came up, it failed. I forget exactly which items were shown, but all the ATA Channel 0/1/etc. entries had the yellow exclamation marks by them in Device Manager. From what I could tell, this happened because I'd successfully changed the registry and BIOS to AHCI but Windows wasn't able to install whatever AHCI-specific drivers were necessary.

I reverted the changes and am back to running in IDE mode.

I came across another thread indicating to "download the AHCI drivers for your chipset", stick them somewhere in the Windows directory, and then it would know to install them when it rebooted again. Problem is, I can't find whatever AHCI drivers I need for my Z68 board. The Gigabyte site only has something called "preinstall drivers" which sounds like what you use when installing Win7, not trying to do something like this.

I also nabbed a utility from Gigabyte called the "Disk Mode Switch" which was created specifically for instances like this, when someone needs to go from IDE to AHCI, but it doesn't sound like it has the AHCI drivers included... So it's basically bundling the registry edits into a single one-click program, but won't necessarily help me getting Windows to actually "use" AHCI.

TL;DR - I was 75% able to change my registry/bios from IDE to AHCI, but am getting stuck at the point of installing the AHCI drivers, and need to figure out where to get the "raw" drivers from.

Thanks ahead of time, and sorry this was so lengthy. I'd be happy to post any follow-up info or answer question if it'll help.

 

Probably sounds too simple, but have you tried starting in safe mode? just ignore the suggestion, if you have tried this- unless you try something like driver booster.
https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/iobit_driver_booster.html I use that, and it saves a lot of hunting for drivers
This, as you probably know does , only installs basic drivers.
If not,it could be worth the effort.
If it starts up ok, then look at device drivers, and try updating drivers from there.