I avoided a Force GT 120GB BSOD by reconnecting the power!

I have a Force Series GT 120 GB on which I have Windows 7 64. The drive is running in AHCI mode. When I first installed Windows, I saw BSODs at least once a day. I updated the drive to Corsair firmware 1.3 a week ago and I've seen 4 freezes/BSODs since then.

 

I did a bunch of reading and thinking, and figured out that the drive seems to simply lose power when it freezes, causing the OS not to see it, and shortly thereafter, generate a blue screen of death and crash. Since it's in AHCI mode, it's supposed to be hot-pluggable. Therefore, if I simply unplug the power and plug it back in, it should be recognized again. That was my theory.

 

A few minutes ago, my machine started the normal freeze-up thing that it does before it BSODs. I decided to test my above theory and unplugged the drive's power connector and plugged it back in. This was convenient to do with my Corsair Graphite 600T case. After doing so, Windows 7 unfroze and became stable once again, successfully avoiding the imminent BSOD! I'm now typing this post from the same session! :D

 

Hopefully something can be learned from this. If nothing else, this is a successful workaround for the BSODs while actually using the machine.

I have a Force Series GT 120 GB on which I have Windows 7 64. The drive is running in AHCI mode. When I first installed Windows, I saw BSODs at least once a day. I updated the drive to Corsair firmware 1.3 a week ago and I've seen 4 freezes/BSODs since then.

 

I did a bunch of reading and thinking, and figured out that the drive seems to simply lose power when it freezes, causing the OS not to see it, and shortly thereafter, generate a blue screen of death and crash. Since it's in AHCI mode, it's supposed to be hot-pluggable. Therefore, if I simply unplug the power and plug it back in, it should be recognized again. That was my theory.

 

A few minutes ago, my machine started the normal freeze-up thing that it does before it BSODs. I decided to test my above theory and unplugged the drive's power connector and plugged it back in. This was convenient to do with my Corsair Graphite 600T case. After doing so, Windows 7 unfroze and became stable once again, successfully avoiding the imminent BSOD! I'm now typing this post from the same session! :D

 

Hopefully something can be learned from this. If nothing else, this is a successful workaround for the BSODs while actually using the machine.

 

Nice find; thanks! Will try it for myself if I ever get another freeze. Looks definitely like some power issue here.

Little things like that are what corsair and sandforce needs. Good find.

I have a Force Series GT 120 GB on which I have Windows 7 64. The drive is running in AHCI mode. When I first installed Windows, I saw BSODs at least once a day. I updated the drive to Corsair firmware 1.3 a week ago and I've seen 4 freezes/BSODs since then.

 

I did a bunch of reading and thinking, and figured out that the drive seems to simply lose power when it freezes, causing the OS not to see it, and shortly thereafter, generate a blue screen of death and crash. Since it's in AHCI mode, it's supposed to be hot-pluggable. Therefore, if I simply unplug the power and plug it back in, it should be recognized again. That was my theory.

 

A few minutes ago, my machine started the normal freeze-up thing that it does before it BSODs. I decided to test my above theory and unplugged the drive's power connector and plugged it back in. This was convenient to do with my Corsair Graphite 600T case. After doing so, Windows 7 unfroze and became stable once again, successfully avoiding the imminent BSOD! I'm now typing this post from the same session! :D

 

Hopefully something can be learned from this. If nothing else, this is a successful workaround for the BSODs while actually using the machine.

 

You would very likely benefit from the LPM registry fix.

I checked my registry and it doesn't have an "iaStor" key, causing me to think that for the LPM registry fix to be effective, it requires Intel Rapid Storage Technology to be installed, which I don't have installed. Last time I tried installing it and rebooting, Windows wouldn't boot (the drive was recognized but Windows was fubar, afaik) and I had to use a restore point to get it bootable again.

 

However, I've set hard drives to never turn off in my Windows power management profile.

 

Edit: I just made a system restore point and then tried installing Intel Rapid Storage Technology. Sure enough, after the "Starting Windows" screen with the animated Windows logo, it immediately BSODed and rebooted. I used the system restore point and was able to boot again. I don't know why IRST does this. I'm much happier being able to boot.

 

Edit: There's a blog post here that seems promising for fixing the BSOD I get after installing Intel RST, but I don't know how to do what he says to do. Come to think of it, I did accidentally run the automatic-on-first-boot "XHD" (eXtreme Hard Drive) tool on the mobo on my first boot of this system, so maybe there's some RAID flag I need to disable on the drive before I can install IRST. I just need to know how to do that. I wish the IRST installer did that on its own instead of leaving the drive in a BSOD-on-boot state.

Is your BIOS storage configuration set on AHCI?.

Yes. It is.

Is it set on the first HDD priority and boot priority?.

Can you try set it on IDE and install it them change it for AHCI or RAID (For Intel Smart Response Technology)

Is the SSD on a Intel port?

It (assuming you mean the Force GT 120GB SSD) is set as the first boot and HDD priority.

 

Please be more detailed with your suggestion.

 

I have confirmed that the SSD is connected to one of the two Intel-Z68-controlled SATA 6Gb/s ports.

What i meant is change the storage configuration to IDE and try installing IRST then after you installed it and it works put the configuration back to AHCI.

Last time I did something like that, the OS wouldn't boot at all, even after setting it back to its original configuration. It seemed to corrupt the drive and I had to completely format it and reinstall the OS (because a restore point didn't work). I really don't want to have to do that ever again. Are you sure your suggestion is safe?

If it didn't work and you tried it then i wouldn't suggest it.

save your BIOS settings and do a BIOS reset. then once you done a reset go change the Storage configuration to AHCI and try it,

That sounds like a bad idea. I'd rather not mess with weird things like that right now and first, use the fix posted by Jack Brennan in his blog once he explains it to me. I've posted a comment to which I hope he'll reply.

If you have important data its best to back it up now.

What? Why? I'm not going to delete my data or corrupt my drive. Instead, I'm going to do what I said I would do in my most recent post (wait for a comment response).

Thanks to advice from Jack Brennan (the same guy who wrote the blog linked in this thread), I updated by BIOS with Gigabyte's @BIOS utility hassle-free and was then able to see the Intel RAID boot ROM. Sure enough, both my drives are flagged as RAID even though they work normally in AHCI mode.

 

However, when pressing "Reset Disks to Non-RAID" and seeing the disk selection screen, it gave a concerning warning: "WARNING: Resetting disks to non-RAID will clear all data on the disk." or something to that effect. Is this true even if they work normally in AHCI mode? Does this option do more than just toggle the drives' RAID flags?

Form Jack Brennan's blog post:

 

It was pure luck that i came across that, but it solved my problem. So if you have ran a drive in RAID recently and are having problems, maybe you should try de-flagging the drive as raid because formatting it does not do this!

 

Jack.

 

He is correct. However, there are 2 things that users should take from this.

 

1. There is no benefit whatsoever to formatting a drive in this cirumstance. If you do a complete format, you are putting more of the NAND into a written state which will slow drive performance.

 

2. Any time you migrate an SSD from one usage to another, a secure erase is a great idea. It places all the NAND into a writable state and thus improves the performance by restoring the drive to its factory state. And, an SE will remove the previous MBR info and thus remove the RAID flag.

 

Problem solved all while improving SSD performance. But the best idea is to remove drives from a RAID array in the controller BIOS before changing them, then do the secure erase.

Thanks for the secure erase idea, but that doesn't answer my question. Will "Resetting disks to non-RAID" actually "clear all data on the disk." or is that just to warn users who were actually running their disks as RAID arrays (i.e. not me) that the OS/etc. wouldn't be able to recognize the data after the flag is toggled?

 

If possible, I'd rather avoid going through the whole secure erase process because I don't have an easy way to back up my whole OS drive and re-write it once the secure erase is complete. My OS supports TRIM anyway, so performance isn't an issue. I just want to toggle (to disabled) the RAID flag on my drives so IRST doesn't cause a BSOD on boot.

 

I'm using the Microsoft AHCI driver and it doesn't cause a BSOD when booting in AHCI mode even though the drives' RAID flags are enabled. I wish IRST was just as resilient. It's probably fixable on Intel's end with an update to IRST.

If it's a single drive that was on a controller in RAID mode but not in a stripe, I don't know the answer to that. You should ask Intel.

 

If it's 2+ drives that were actually in a RAID -0 stripe then yes, the data is lost.

It's the former. I should ask Intel.