Intel Rapid Start Technology on single SSD (EUFI boot)

Hi All,

I bought a new Dell Vostro 3360, Core i5, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD, BIOS (A11) before Christmas.

Worked great and then failed to boot. 2 days on phone support, ultimately the old motherboard (BIOS A11) was replaced under warranty as it was not possible to boot from USB, would not Boot from SSD, no optical drive, BIOS could not be flashed etc.

However since the new motherboard (A12) Intel Rapid Start has exhibited the following behaviour:

1. IRST timer set to 1 minute. Documents left open on screen.
2. On lid close / sleep, the sys enters S3 state with power light pulsing.
3. After waiting 1 min, the hard drive light comes on, apparently writing the active RAM session to the SSD 'hibernate' partition.
4. All power lights go out, system would now appear to be in S4.
5. Pressing the power button, the power lights light up briefly (around 1 sec) and then all lights go out and system does not boot.
6. Pressing power button a second time the system, will 'cold' boot, ie not resume from sleep. Returning to the desktop any open docs are closed. And examining the Event Log shows:

1. Critical - Error ID 41 - "The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly."

• The above appears to demonstrate that at step 4, when power to the RAM is cut, the session is lost, either it doesn't successfully get written to the partition or if it does, then it fails to be returned to RAM at step 5.
• For the record, disabling Windows 'Fast startup' makes no differnce.
• Disabling Windows Hibernate via elevated cmd powercfg -h off, makes no difference.

So in the current state as left by the Dell Engineer, the system if not manually shutdown and allowed to Sleep will lose your open/unsaved work.

1. I updated the BIOS to the latest version 'A13' with no improvement.
2. I have deleted and re-created the 8192MB volume with DISKPART as per - http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/kcs/document?c=us&cs=19&docid=545794&doclang=en&l=en&s=dhs

With the exception that for a Win8 EUFI boot using a GPT disk, the SET ID is required to be SET ID=D3BFE2DE-3DAF-11DF-BA40-E3A556D89593.

SET ID=84 OVERRIDE does not work on this kind of Disk.

I also then re-installed the latest Rapid Start setup from Dell - 2.1.0.1002, A00 (23/10/2012)

3. The above partition appear to be 'accepted' by IRST, as unless setting the ID as above, IRST disappears from the BIOS and errors when running the IRST setup program.

4. If I don't follow the above then, IRST is not visible in the BIOS and I receive a 'Rapid Start is not enabled' message on boot to desktop. In this scenario the sys stays in S3 indefinitely.

I have spent a further 2 days on the phone with Dell Support, and their ultimate solution is replace the motherboard again.

I would like to know if there any other avenues / options to re-instate the Intel Rapid Start Technology.

Kind regards
Graham

Ps apologies if this should be in the 'Laptops' thread rather than 'Disk Drives'?