Finally got my Force Series 3 60 drive to update on my ASUS Motherboard

I took the cheap route and picked up a 60gig drive just to dip my toe in the water of home based SSD drives. After the inital install of my drive, I had really quick boot times, and programs loaded quickly.. However, so did random blue screens and crashes. I being a DJ, use my computer for a weekly audio/video POD cast, and during my weekly show, my machine had bluescreened on me in the middle of my set a few weeks in a row. Its one thing when your machine tanks in the middle of a game.. another when your rocking a virtual audience all around the world. Big time vibe killer.

 

I came to these forums looking for help. I noticed there was an update to my drive, downloaded it, and it didn't work. I couldn't make the jump from 1.2 to 1.3.2. Various tips and tricks didn't work for me. Starting last night, and most of the today, i proceeded to figure out how to make this work.

 

Long story short.. Here are my specs.

 

asus m4a87td/usb3 motherboard

am3 amd 6 core cpu

4 gigs of ram.

 

Here are the steps to get me running pretty stable.

 

1. First downloaded to a USB stick for later:

A. Windows 7 Service Pack 1.

B. MS Fix it program to switch from IDE to AHCI

C. Nvida Drivers

D. Raid Drivers from Asus.

E. Corsair SSD Firmware update.

F. AMD Motherboard drivers.

G. Network Drivers

H. USB3 Drivers.

2. Made a backup of all the data I cared about to an external drive.

3. Updated my bios to latest.

4. Turned off my computer.

5. Popped open the case and unplugged all my sata devices except my SSD drive and my cdrom.

6. Booted into my Bios Set all my Sata Ports to use IDE.

7. Booting into the Windows 7 Installer.

8. Deleted the Partitions on my SSD drive, formated and did a fresh install.

** If it doesn't do a fresh install, and complains about the drive. Then go into recovery mode, get to a dos prompt, and delete all the partitions on the drive via diskpart

9. After Windows Reinstalls itself goto Windows Explorer, navigate to your USB stick and run the MSFIX it utility to switch Windows from IDE to AHCI and then reboot. This *needs* to the first thing you run. then reboot.

10. Go into your bios and change your Sata Settings from IDE to AHCI.

11. Boot into Windows.

12. Navigate back to your usb stick and run the Corsair Utility to update the firmware on your SSD Drive.

13. It should update your drive.

 

If you don't run any raid devices, then at this point you can stop and load all the normal windows patches, drivers and what not. But if you have a few mirrored disks and use the internal raid controller like me, then keep reading.

 

14. If the drive updated, then shutdown and reboot.

15. In the BIOS, change your AHCI setting to RAID

16. Stick the Windows 7 Installer CD back into the CD drive and reboot.

17. The Installer will not detect your Raid setting, plug your USB stick in, and navigate to the ASUS raid Drivers and select the the RAID Support AHCI driver.

18. It should detect your SSD Drive, select it and install Windows on it.

** If it doesn't do a fresh install, and complains about the drive. Then go into recovery mode, get to a dos prompt, and delete all the partitions on the drive via diskpart

19. After Windows Reinstalls itself goto Windows Explorer, navigate to your USB stick and run the MSFIX it utility to switch Windows from IDE to AHCI and then reboot. This *needs* to the first thing you run. then reboot.

20. Once the machine reboots you'll beable to install Windows 7 SP1, MotherBoard ddrivers, Video Drivers, USB3 Drivers, and Network Drivers. I suggest doing them in that order.

21 Shutdown.

22 Reconnected in the remaining unplugged drives.

 

Do NOT install the AMD RaidExpert Drivers from the AMD site. I had all sorts of problems with them.

 

I noticed that the Corsair Update Utility no longer detects my drive in Raid Mode.. Going into the Bios and changing it back to AHCI, and rebooting would cause my machine to BlueScreen. So If I plan to goto the next firmware version for my ssd, i'll have to some how make the above easier. boot cd or something.

 

Anyway...

 

Hope that helps a few of you folks, and i hope the above keeps my machine a bit more stable.

 

Catch me djing live every Wednesday Night 8pm Cen Till 10pm Cen time over here: http://www.everydayjunglist.org/

That's the point of RAID: to tell the OS that both drives are one. No update tool would be able to know what drive it is.

i forgot to mention that I have 1 ssd drive and 2 320gig regular drives. the 320s are raided together. the 1 ssd drive is still stand lone.

I'm curious whether the new firmware solves your bsod.

Tell us your experience after 1 or 2 week with 1.32

Yes and No.

 

Yes, because my machine is stable. I've only had 2 bluescreens in the last 4 months, and I leave my machine on all the time.

 

No because I'm barely getting transfer speeds I would have expected.

 

This hurts me when I need to master my POD cast recordings via sound forge because they take longer then expected.

 

I'm sacrificing Performance for Stability, when I paid a decent amount of money for both.

Update the firmware to 1.3.3.

Thanks for the response Yellowbeard, however.. Just getting my drive to update to 1.3.2 required me to reload windows twice. I'll have to do the same for 1.3.3.

 

I used to make BartPE do all sorts of stuff, but I think support for that guy has sorta died off. I'll take a stab at the UBCD and see if I can make the updater tool work with it, with out having to reload my box.