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Solution: No drives recognized in Force firmware update utility!


Synbios

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I've seen a lot of people struggling with this problem.

 

1) In case you didn't read thoroughly through the instructions: you should right click the updater tool and click run as administrator. Despite if your account on Windows has administrative attributes or not, you still need to do this.

 

2) There is known incompatibility with Intel RST 10.x series drivers, downgrade to Intel RST 9.x or use Microsoft AHCI drivers for the update and then re-install the latest Intel RST drivers afterward.

 

3) If you already tried that and it still doesn't work, I recommend trying a Live CD environment such as Hiren's Boot CD or UBCD4Win, especially if the drive you are trying to update is the one that contains your OS.

 

4) As a last resort if those do not work, try deleting all the partitions on the drive and doing a secure erase. Make sure you backup your contents first!

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  • 4 weeks later...

THANK YOU! for posting this...

 

YellowBeard's sticky NEEDS this info in it.

 

I just upgraded my firmware cleanly, so easy... once i had this info.

 

I even made a trip to my parents place 25 mins away to try it earlier, as my intel motherboard apparently had issues with the storage driver and couldnt see it... that's what i inferred from YB's sticky about this update anyhow.

 

YB, please include this in your sticky, and also change the wording / expound upon the issue with what will happen if you're using incompatible Intel drivers.

 

 

Thanks again man!!!

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  • 3 weeks later...
What needs to be added though is emphasis many boards don't support ahci - including those using the nforce 430 chipset and previous.

 

Honestly, I don't have the time to go back and research what chipsets do and don't support AHCI. And, add to it that some boards with chipsets that DO support AHCI according to the chipset maker, have also had it disabled in the BIOS by the motherboard manufacturer and you'll quickly see that it would be an almost impossible task to compile an accurate list. I think it's reasonable that a motherboard owner can easily determine this on their own.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hello,

I would like to upgrade the firmware but my drive is not recognized.

I should try the Live CD environment, but I don't know what it is...

I have downloaded both Hiren's Boot CD and UBCD4Win.

Now, what I should do ?

 

Thank You very much

Best regards

AA

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Hello,

I would like to upgrade the firmware but my drive is not recognized.

I should try the Live CD environment, but I don't know what it is...

I have downloaded both Hiren's Boot CD and UBCD4Win.

Now, what I should do ?

 

Thank You very much

Best regards

AA

 

Have you tried option #1 first?

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You should check with Hiren's or UBCD forums to get that working, we can't help you with other products here.

 

Is it okay if you delete the contents on the drive? If it is, then you can try secure erasing the drive and then seeing if the drive is detected by the update utility.

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  • 1 month later...
I too experienced the "No Drive Found" problem and I was indeed running the upgrade exe as administrator. I then booted the system from my Bart PE 3110 CD. The CSSD-F120GB2 was now detected and the v 2.0 firmware update completed successfully. I had previously tried to run V 2.0 from an installation of Vista X64 which resides on another HDD on this system. The CSSD was not detected under that scenario. I am wondering if there is a problem running it on a 64 bit system. Both the Win 7 (on the CSSD itself) and the Vista (on another HDD) are 64 bit. The Bart PE 3110 runs a "lite" version of 32 bit XP.
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I too experienced the "No Drive Found" problem and I was indeed running the upgrade exe as administrator. I then booted the system from my Bart PE 3110 CD. The CSSD-F120GB2 was now detected and the v 2.0 firmware update completed successfully. I had previously tried to run V 2.0 from an installation of Vista X64 which resides on another HDD on this system. The CSSD was not detected under that scenario. I am wondering if there is a problem running it on a 64 bit system. Both the Win 7 (on the CSSD itself) and the Vista (on another HDD) are 64 bit. The Bart PE 3110 runs a "lite" version of 32 bit XP.

 

No there is no compatibility problems with 64 bit. Most likely there was a problem with AHCI or IDE mode.

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  • 2 months later...
Honestly, I don't have the time to go back and research what chipsets do and don't support AHCI. And, add to it that some boards with chipsets that DO support AHCI according to the chipset maker, have also had it disabled in the BIOS by the motherboard manufacturer and you'll quickly see that it would be an almost impossible task to compile an accurate list. I think it's reasonable that a motherboard owner can easily determine this on their own.

 

With all due respect, here's the problem I have with this approach: Does the Corsair Force drive work with chipsets that don't include AHCI capability? Yes it does. There are quite a few of them, actually. So why does Corsair Support think it's okay to require that users find a particular configuration of an AHCI-supporting chipset to perform a firmware update? Let me put it another way: If the drive works in a particular hardware environment then the firmware update process bloody well should too! Anything else is customer-hostile. Other SSD manufacturers have figured this out. Why can't Corsair/Sandforce? Brand I offers firmware updates that run anywhere the drives do, and without any drama from my experience.

 

IMO, in the future, they, if they intend to remain viable in this business, should offer a complete package for firmware update that consists of an ISO with its own operating environment and the update applet all rolled into one. User downloads the ISO, burns it, boots off it, and FW is updated. On any platform. I can't think of a single reason why a user should be required to remove a drive that requires update from a working machine and temporarily install it in some other (AHCI-equipped) machine simply to update FW.

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With all due respect, here's the problem I have with this approach: Does the Corsair Force drive work with chipsets that don't include AHCI capability? Yes it does. There are quite a few of them, actually. So why does Corsair Support think it's okay to require that users find a particular configuration of an AHCI-supporting chipset to perform a firmware update? Let me put it another way: If the drive works in a particular hardware environment then the firmware update process bloody well should too! Anything else is customer-hostile. Other SSD manufacturers have figured this out. Why can't Corsair/Sandforce? Brand I offers firmware updates that run anywhere the drives do, and without any drama from my experience.

 

IMO, in the future, they, if they intend to remain viable in this business, should offer a complete package for firmware update that consists of an ISO with its own operating environment and the update applet all rolled into one. User downloads the ISO, burns it, boots off it, and FW is updated. On any platform. I can't think of a single reason why a user should be required to remove a drive that requires update from a working machine and temporarily install it in some other (AHCI-equipped) machine simply to update FW.

 

Where did you read in this thread that AHCI is required to update the firmware? I think it was reported someplace that the firmware was updated using an AHCI system but compatibility on IDE systems is "try at your own risk" per se.

 

It works fine on IDE.

 

But with all due respect, AHCI is de facto standard for SATA controllers. IDE is for IDE ribbon cables or PATA. There's only a handful of <lousy> nForce boards that don't have AHCI and maybe a few others.

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Where did you read in this thread that AHCI is required to update the firmware? I think it was reported someplace that the firmware was updated using an AHCI system but compatibility on IDE systems is "try at your own risk" per se.

 

It works fine on IDE.

 

But with all due respect, AHCI is de facto standard for SATA controllers. IDE is for IDE ribbon cables or PATA. There's only a handful of <lousy> nForce boards that don't have AHCI and maybe a few others.

 

 

Are you serious? WHERE? How about HERE:

 

http://forum.corsair.com/forums/showthread.php?t=90759

 

Fifth paragraph.

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Are you serious? WHERE? How about HERE:

 

http://forum.corsair.com/forums/showthread.php?t=90759

 

Fifth paragraph.

 

If your drive controller is not AHCI enabled and your update fails,

 

Meaning try it first and see if it fails. However I don't think that statement is entirely correct because there are other reasons why the firmware update would fail especially if the drive is your OS drive. I have done the firmware update in IDE.

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No, that's not what YB said. He said IF it fails and you're not using AHCI then to turn it on. He never said AHCI is required.

 

Yes I agree that's what I was saying as well.

 

But if it does fail and you don't have the option to turn on AHCI, I think there are some other things you can try first. In other words if it fails you cannot tell right away if it was because it is the lack of AHCI or not.

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I personally have three systems with first-generation SATA on them (965 chipset and ICH7) whose BIOS do not support AHCI. If you try to install the Intel RST AHCI driver to them they will boot to a bluescreen and require repair. While I don't have census data, I suspect that there are a whole lot of systems out there of this vintage that are in the same situation.

 

I attempted the FW update on two of these (one with XPSP3 and one with Win7-32) in legacy "IDE" mode. It failed each time the same way. With the "standard" install it reported that the drive was incompatible (I don't recall the exact wording of the error message but that was the intent of it). The "alternate" install caused both systems to come to an instantaneous stop. I have to give the Sandforce developers some credit. It takes a lot to hard-crash a Win 7 system, but they managed to do it! Good work, Sandforce!!

 

So I'll reiterate my objection one more time: 1) If the drive runs on System X, then the FW updater ought to run on System X as well. 2) It's poor practice to run a FW update on a "live" disk if there's any chance that it will corrupt the disk or the running system. From the reports here, that's the case with this FW update, so there's no way I'm going to do that. Therefore the manufacturer should supply a "live" environment along with the FW updater.

 

I'm now finished screwing around with this half-baked FW update process. I might consider Corsair SSDs in the future, but will first see if they've gotten serious about product support first. No more of this Amateur Hour stuff for me, thanks.

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People. This is in plain English. What he said is this:

 

"This update tool is intended to be run with the drive controller in AHCI mode. If your drive controller is not AHCI enabled and your update fails, you will need to change it to AHCI mode and also enable AHCI in your OS registry."

 

There is no ambiguity about this declaratory sentence:

This update tool is intended to be run with the drive controller in AHCI mode.

 

And that's reinforced by the following sentence where it says if the update fails, then put the controller in AHCI mode.

 

HOW can there be any other interpretation of that?

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For Intel based users, the update may not work with the Intel 10 series storage drivers. If you have issues with this update and you are using the 10 series Intel storage drivers, revert to the 9 series or use the Microsoft AHCI driver.

does the sentence above indicate it will also work in IDE mode using series 9 drivers if AHCI is not available? or am i reading it wrong? if AHCI mode was not available why bother posting info on reverting to IDE driver version 9 if ver 10 does not work?

I'm asking for clarity myself and not posting this as a "counter argument" so please do not interpret it as such :):

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2) It's poor practice to run a FW update on a "live" disk if there's any chance that it will corrupt the disk or the running system.

 

Actually it's bad practice to update the firmware from a disk you're currently running off of, that's why I recommend the live disk. Most firmware updates are performed outside of the OS environment viewing the update drive from an outside point of view. For some reason SandForce thought it would be easier for customers to be able to update from within their Windows environments and this works for the vast majority of people, however it actually complicates things especially for those who aren't even running Windows. I personally prefer command line, OS-less, bootable tools for firmware updates like what Samsung puts out. However, the SandForce updater does work. You're one of very few who claim it doesn't work at all, and also refuse to take my advice and build a live Windows CD, which has worked for a lot of people. I personally, have updated a Force drive on an IDE system using UBCD4Win.

 

does the sentence above indicate it will also work in IDE mode using series 9 drivers if AHCI is not available? or am i reading it wrong? if AHCI mode was not available why bother posting info on reverting to IDE driver version 9 if ver 10 does not work?

I'm asking for clarity myself and not posting this as a "counter argument" so please do not interpret it as such :):

 

Let's say you have an ICH that supports both AHCI and IDE. If you have it in AHCI mode then you have the choice between Microsoft AHCI or Intel RST drivers. Correct me if I'm wrong but if you have it set to IDE mode, then you cannot use either of those driver sets, you will use a legacy Microsoft IDE controller driver instead, which should also work but this also requires a regedit and also requires a user to be using IDE rather than AHCI which may be undesirable.

 

To summarize: If you are using ICH in AHCI mode with Intel RST 10.x drivers, you have 3 options: 1) downgrade to Intel RST 9.x temporarily for the update 2) uninstall and let Microsoft AHCI take over 3) regedit and then change to IDE mode, let the legacy IDE drivers install.

 

Nobody knows (at least publically) why Intel RST 10.x drivers broke the updater, but it was reported over at other SandForce product forums as well.

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  • 6 months later...

4) As a last resort if those do not work, try deleting all the partitions on the drive and doing a secure erase. Make sure you backup your contents first!

My drive (F120 fw 1.1) is TrueCrypt 'ed. Do you think this can have an effect on the (failure) of the fw update?

This is the phenomenon I encounter:

- On W7-x64: fw 2.0 alternate update: no error, reboot, still on v1.1

fw 2.0 : "not in package", fw 2.4 : "not in package"...

- On Live-CD (Hiren's) : fw 2.0 alternate : "sector 64" message, freezes for a minute, message "updated failed".

 

Concerning the package .pkg files: I wonder why Corsair is putting 185 different firmwares in one big ZIP file? And what are the numbers of the files in this ZIP file? Related to the serial nr, model nr? The file for my drive is "12112" from the Corsair_Force_SSD_FW_Update_2.0_Alternate.pkg package.

 

Thanks!

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