BSOD on cold boot & return from stand-by

I have a love/hate relationship with my newly acquired Corsair Force 120. It's running the latest firmware, version 2.0 (came pre-loaded with it), and works fine, except when it doesn't. On cold-boot I'll get a BSOD, to get past this I have to startup with F8, go to "Repair my computer", go to command prompt, and run CHKDSK, afterwards, I can restart and it will boot up and run fine thereafter, until I shutdown. Similarly, if I go to "sleep" I will be greeted with a BSOD upon return from sleep. This requires me to run the steps above to get back into my system. Needless to say my life would be wonderful if this didn't happen. After reading the forums it appears this is happening to lots of people and seems somewhat unacceptable as this is the main drive in my laptop, which by it's nature experiences lots of shutdowns and "sleep".

 

I'm running an HP Probook 5310m and I don't want to RMA the drive, as the drive runs fine, except that I can't get into the operating system without the above workaround. I'm running the latest Intel RST drivers, my motherboard is in AHCI mode and running the latest BIOS my hp offers. I don't see these issues with the SSD drives from other manufactures and am currently experiencing buyers remorse. Please help vindicate my purchase of Corsair, and let me know if there's a solution, workaround, or anything that I can do to get this issue to go away.

 

See the following links for pictures of the situation:

http://imgur.com/yxtea

http://imgur.com/bdZJ9

http://imgur.com/4kcg9

http://imgur.com/2hjZS

I didn't purchase the system this way. This past holiday I got the Corsair Force 120 SSD as a gift. I'm a fairly technical person and swapped out the drive in my Probook for the SSD. I installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 64bit which I bought for the occasion, and after install updated all the necessary drivers. I had updated the system BIOS before the swap to ensure it had latest bios before the SSD install.

 

This is the resulting situation.

The only thing I didn't see was an update to the latest Force firmware.

 

I too have a like/dislike relationship. My problems are nearly so bad, I rarely have a start up problem. It's just knowing that there is sometimes a problem makes me unhappy. I got the Force series because of the price. It was much cheaper than a similar sized drive with a Samsung or Intel controller.

 

Sandforce controlled SSDs aren't recommended by Corsair for OEM systems.

 

Overall, I am happy enough. The drive works fine with the execption of a very minor inconvience. The price was right and the support here was very good.

I got no errors during install. I always got the return from sleep BSOD, but cold boot errors started happening after several forced windows updates.

 

SATA controller is Intel ICH9M-E/M SATA AHCI Controller version 10.1.0.1008, 11/6/2010. Appears to be latest and greatest version.

I have yet to shutdown or sleep since I originally posted. Any one have any ideas or am I just for lack of a better term, hosed.

I have been having the exact same issue as you since I updated to FW 2.0 about 3 days ago. I get a BSOD upon a cold boot, EVERY time. So far no response on my RMA request or forum posts.

Yep, clearly Corsair doesn't care very much about its customers. If they would just help us I would be very happy towards Corsair and hold them in a very favorable light. Now I'm regretting not returning the drive when I had the chance, and will likely avoid Corsair products in the future. I'll be leaving in a few hours with my laptop and will have to shut everything down and do the workaround to continue. Really really a shame. Major slap in the face to their customers.

RAM GUY, as mentioned previously the drive came preloaded to firmware 2.0. My laptop is a relatively recent model (HP Probook 5310m), and offers native SSD drive options. Just like someone can buy a traditional rotational drive without issue, I would suspect that one could receive a Corsair SSD drive as a gift. A layman bought the drive this for me as a holiday gift, and nowhere did it say on Newegg when they bought it that it only works in some systems, or try your luck.

 

Traditionally companies support their products, rather than suggest to the customer that they remove their drive and try it in different systems. I know the drive works, I'm using it now. If you would actually read what I wrote, you'll see that I have to do a silly work around to get into my system. Clearly there's an issue somewhere, and your suggestions aren't helpful. If possible, please help me troubleshoot this issue, as you can see on the forums and google and newegg reviews there are many that are having this issue. Please fess up and say there's a known problem, or a fix is being worked on, or something, and not that I'm crazy and that everyone else's drive works. SSD drives are expensive, money was paid for the drive, now please support it.

Traditionally companies support their products, rather than suggest to the customer that they remove their drive and try it in different systems.

Trying it in different systems is a standard troubleshooting step that quickly and easily can determine if it's the drive or not.

 

Having said that, try Intel RST 9.x or 8.x as some have found those to work better for them. Ultimately though I haven't seen many OEM laptops that like any SSDs other than Intel or Samsung based (e.g. the Corsair P series) drives. I have yet to see any explanation for this other than Intel / Samsung SSDs are slower and simpler drives.

@wired I'm sorry I wasn't clear above, but I have using the latest Intel RST driver. I had listed the version number and not the name "RST". In regards to trying it in another computer there's no way it would work. It already has an OS on it, and as you know Windows won't let you just pop-in drives to different hardware. I would have to reformat my drive (wiping out my current applications, etc), and then re-install the OS, run the necessary updates to find that it works, and I'm sure it does. That's not the issue here.

 

The issue is that it's not working in my laptop. Who cares if it's OEM? Why isn't there a huge disclaimer saying that this product might not work in new laptops, especially one by a huge manufacturer like HP. I just want to not have BSOD, I can bypass it and get in, but it's annoying. I thought we were past the wild west days of SSD, I guess I was wrong. I should have returned the drive and gotten an OCZ drive instead. Even though they're sandforce I haven't read about any unresolved issues from them.

 

Let me repeat, I am using the drive right now, it works, I can get in. It just BSOD every time from cold boot, or sleep. I need to do the workaround listed above to get in, but otherwise it works great. I just can't have a laptop that won't resume from sleep or cold boot without workaround, come on, that's not too much to ask. If you can please help me troubleshoot, let me know what I should try.

 

So far I have mfr latest bios which was released just a few days ago, latest Intel everything, I don't know what else I can do? Do I just wait until there's another firmware update? I just need to know that there's a solution on the horizon,or if I'm hosed forever. That's all.

@RAM GUY, here you go.

He's definitely running the latest official Intel RST drivers for his ICH9 and in AHCI mode.

10.1.0.1008

 

You claim that you're running the latest BIOS, but have you checked back since then? Have you searched for or tried a beta BIOS as well?

@synbios I contacted HP today to see if there were any experimental bios, but they said there wasn't and the most recent version, F.0D, released this past Jan 12th is the latest version. http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=321957&prodSeriesId=4021356&prodNameId=4021357&swEnvOID=4059&swLang=13&mode=2&taskId=135&swItem=ob-90670-1

The error code should be in the screenshots originally linked to, here it is again http://imgur.com/yxtea. Yes, I get the same error on both cold and warm reboot. I do get a different error when returning from standby. I'll have that for you in a few minutes. I'll test out the above tips.

Ok, my hybrid suspend was already off in Windows. I don't have any options in my BIOS that I can see to turn off suspend to ram and and set it to suspend to disk.

 

Here's the BSOD that I get when trying to return from sleep:

http://imgur.com/HGQ8F

RAM GUY as mentioned previously hybrid suspend is already disabled. I'll turn off suspect to Ram, and try suspend to disk. I'll let you know how that goes. Either way this will not address the cold and warm boot issues mentioned previously.

The suspend to RAM was fixed with firmware 2.0 though, that doesn't make any sense. In your first post you claimed that the firmware is 2.0, but have you checked crystaldiskinfo? How did you get that information?

 

If you are having the BSOD after resume from sleep and you have firmware 2.0 for sure, I'm afraid the only other way to fix that problem is to disable S3 in BIOS and force S1 only. Laptops employ power saving features and cutoff power to the drive during suspend to RAM when in fact it should be providing power even when the drive is asleep. That's why you're having these problems, an that's why you won't have these problems with suspend to disk. Your laptop probably uses Aggressive Link Power Management (ALPM) which cuts power to drives during low CPU stages. If you have the option to disable ALPM in BIOS, definitely disable it.

 

The only way to fix the no detection on cold boot is to increase IDE timeout time. If you don't have these features in your BIOS, there is no way to fix the issues I'm afraid.

 

It may seem like the SandForce drives are buggy because of these issues but in fact the nature of laptops are not really designed to work with high performance SSDs which require a lot of power. That's why we recommend the Performance series drives that are more compatible with OEM systems with fewer BIOS features.

@Synbios, I checked the drive was firmware 2.0 in the firmware update software. I already knew there were issues before I got the drive with the previous firmware so was expecting to update it, when I tried to update it the software showed that it was already 2.0.

 

I tested suspend to disk and that worked via hibernate and that worked, unfortunately my bios doesn't support different suspend modes, nor do I see an option to increase the IDE timeout time. HP's bios, unfortunately is not that comprehensive, I'm sure if it were a ThinkPad it would... in any event I'm kind of stuck now regarding the Force drive, the giver of the gift already sent in the mail in rebate, thus eliminating any chance I had to return the drive and get a performance in it's place.

 

Hopefully there are other solutions, if not, looks like I'll have a love/hate relationship with the drive for the foreseeable future. I wonder, do you know if there's any project like dd-wrt for routers, but for BIOS? Maybe I can switch the bios to something more comprehensive or stabler, even if it isn't manufacturer sanctioned. At this point I'm willing to do anything necessary.