XPS 8100 - update Intel Rapid Storage Technology for new hard drive?

Hi,

Welcome to our community.

To answer your question, as long as the HDD is functioning fine, we need not update the IRST drivers for the system. If there are any other issue in future, please feel free to write your concern on our Forums.

Thanks for your response.

The new drive appears to be functioning fine. However after I restored my saved image from the previous original drive there is a problem with MSIE 11.

In IE11 under Internet Options > General > Browsing history > Settings, 'Disk space to use' now shows "0"  and  'Current location' is empty. All attempts to enter anything into either or both of these fields results in this error:

"Please select a value between 8 and 8 for how much disk space Temporary Internet Files may use."

Apparently this is a pretty common problem after replacing a hard drive.

I have tried many suggested solutions for this problem that involve resetting IE and changes to the registry but none of these work for me.

A couple of people say they were able to fix this problem by updating or reinstalling Intel Rapid Storage Technology drivers. This appears to be the last hope I currently have to solve my problem.

Dell says the last available update for my XPS 8100 is version 9.5.0.1037 dated 10/2/2009 and updated in 2011.

My concerns are:

What might happen (break) if I reinstall the version 9.5.0.1037 IRST drivers?

Do I need to uninstall the IRST drivers before I reinstall them? Or install overtop the current drivers?

Will these old IRST drivers really support the new hard drive?

Is there any point in researching newer IRST drivers if Dell says the latest ones for the XPS 8100 are version 9.5.0.1037?

Thanks!

Reinstalling the version 9.5.0.1037 IRST drivers that came on the PC did not fix my problems. So I found and installed IRST drivers version 9.6.0.1014. This version works fine on my XPS 8100 and appears to have fixed all the problems I was having after replacing the original 1TB system hard drive from 2010 with another new current 1TB hard drive.

Here are the details of my situation in case this helps anyone else:

I have a Dell XPS 8100 desktop from 2010 running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit SP1. It has been rock solid stable until a couple of months ago when Windows started warning me the hard drive was about to go. I replaced the original 1TB Western Digital Scorpio hard drive with a new 1TB Western Digital Black Performance hard drive.

Then I restored the most recent Macrium Reflect image of the system partition from the old hard drive to the new hard drive. During that restore process I expanded the system partition from 100GB to 256GB.

Everything appeared to be working fine until a few days later when I tried unsuccessfully to open Napster\Rhapsody. I got errors that I needed to update my DRM components. All attempts to do that failed.

To cut a long story short, eventually I discovered that the Internet Explorer Temporary Internet Files settings were gone. All attempts to restore these settings result in this error message:

"Please select a value between 8 and 8 for how mush disk space Temporary Internet Files may use."

Searching revealed that this is a pretty common result after replacing system hard drives. There are several solutions that work for some folks but not others. No solutions I found work for me.

This is not good because, among other things, this problem also prevents Windows Update from successfully downloading updates.

To add to the frustration I now am getting "This computer is not running genuine Windows" messages even though it has been genuine for seven years and Start > Computer > Properties shows "Windows is activated" and shows the Product ID number. All attempts to resolve this problem using Microsoft's online and download methods also fail.

Apparently this too is a common problem when replacing a system hard drive. I suspect the hosed Internet Explorer settings is at the heart of all these problems and that none of the solutions work for this PC.

Microsoft's final solution is to reinstall Windows from scratch. I prefer not to go there with a seven year old PC.

And here is the solution that worked for me:

Update – problems solved!

It has been a week and a couple of days now with everything appearing to be back to working fine.

During way too much research and after having tried many ‘solutions’ that didn’t work for me I noticed an obscure recurring solution to resolve assorted issues that occurred after replacing a system hard drive – update the Intel Rapid Storage Technology drivers.

My Dell XPS 8100 from 2010 came with these drivers but I do not use RAID. A problem was that Dell shows and supports no updates for these drivers beyond the version that came already installed. I reinstalled those but that did not fix my problems. Another problem was that research yielded a lot of cautionary tales about updating or removing these drivers, such as not being able to roll back to earlier versions if the update doesn’t work or being unable to boot up the PC afterwards or ‘bricking’ their hard drive.

Finally I was able to locate a driver that was a point version higher than mine, 9.5.0.1037 to 9.6.0.1014, that was working for another person who has the same Dell I have (but other problems). I applied that version and it fixed the problem with the Temporary Internet File settings in Internet Explorer. That in turn fixed several other assorted problems like the DRM update error I was getting from Napster\Rhapsody and allowed Windows Update to start working again. I still got the "This computer is not running genuine Windows" error the first time I booted up after installing the updated drivers, but this time the accompanying button in the error message to reactivate Windows online worked and that error has not reappeared since.

So, it appears things are back to normal again.

Intel® Rapid Storage Technology for Legacy Intel® Desktop Boards
Version: 9.6.0.1014 (Latest) Date: 3/19/2010

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/15251

is here.  This is the minimum required for Advanced Format drives

which is any drive made after 2011 and larger than 120 gigs.

Advanced Format is a generic term pertaining to any disk sector format used to store data on magnetic disks in hard disk drives (HDDs) that exceeds 512 to 528 bytes per sector, such as the 4096-byte (4 KiB) sectors of the first-generation Advanced Format hard disk drives. It is also sometimes called 512e.

 Drives larger than 2 TB REQUIRE

Intel® Rapid Storage Technology 5 Series Chipset-Based Desktop Boards
Version: 10.1.0.1008 (Latest) Date: 11/29/2010

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/20104/

http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/beyond-2tb/

The 2-TB barrier is the result of this 32-bit limitation. Because the maximum number that can be represented by using 32-bits is 4,294,967,295, this translates to 2.199 TB of capacity by using 512-byte sectors (approximately 2.2 TB). Therefore, a capacity beyond 2.2 TB is not addressable by using the MBR partitioning scheme.

64 Bit windows with GPT partitions can overcome this for BOOT drives.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2581408/

Table 1: Windows support for partitioning schemes as data volumes

* “Hybrid-MBR” is an alternative style of partitioning that is not supported by any version of Windows.

@SpeedStep - thanks for adding this information. I wish I had had it BEFORE I swapped out my failing system HDD for a new one and then spent 6 weeks tracking down the fix for all my problems. :)