Solution: No drives recognized in Force firmware update utility!

[Synbios]

Originally Posted by GeneralEclectic

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.

[Wired]

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.

[Synbios]

Originally Posted by Wired

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.

[GeneralEclectic]

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.

[GeneralEclectic]

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?

[Synthohol]

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

[Synbios]

Originally Posted by GeneralEclectic

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.

Originally Posted by Synthohol

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.

[GunterO]

Originally Posted by Synbios

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!