Why boot fails with bios SATA Mode as AHCI?
It may be that the AHCI mode just doesn't work very well with the American Megatrends BIOS. I had a similar problem with a Gigabyte GA-J1800N-D2H which looks like a similar board featuring an Intel J1800 SoC. I installed Linux Mint 17.2 with xfce 32 bit from a reliable CD-ROM. When the installation finished, it went to restart but got stuck in the shell with a message "ModemManager ... Could not acquire the org.freedesktop.ModemManager1". On attempting several reboots from the HDD, I would drop into into "(initramfs)" most times or get stuck at the message "ata1.00: failed command: READ FPDMA". I retried the installation after wiping the HDD and this made no difference.
After following several red herrings, I tried changing the SATA mode from AHCI to IDE in the BIOS and the machine booted and shut down perfectly. I went backwards and forwards a few times to make sure. THE INSTALLATION WAS PERFORMED IN AHCI MODE BUT WOULD ONLY BOOT AND SHUT DOWN IN IDE MODE.
Details of the BIOS are:
ID: 8A05AG03 Project name: J1800N-D2H Version: F4 Built: 04/29/2014 15:00:08
The board is acceptably responsive in IDE mode.
There are a few things to consider that might help anyone coming across this.
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Disks not detected in BIOS/UEFI when that BIOS is in UEFI(-only) mode: UEFI BIOSes only see GPT partitioned disks. If you can't see your disk it probably is an old MBR partitioned disk. Try chosing Legacy mode in your BIOS to detect MBR disks, change the disk mode to GPT using a partitioning tool, or clear the disk completely (remove all partitions, clear MBR).
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OS not booting when BIOS in AHCI mode but booting when BIOS in IDE mode: Your OS might not have the AHCI or IDE drivers installed after switching AHCI/IDE. In Windows 7, for example, the mode at the time of installation determines the type of drivers installed. You can set the
HKLM/System/CurrentControlSet/Services/msahci/Start=0andHKLM/System/CurrentControlSet/Services/pciide/Start=0registry keys using regedit. It will then reinstall the right driver whenever you switch AHCI/IDE BIOS modes.