XPS8700 32Gb SATA SSD

Is your controller mode set to RAID in the BIOS?

Apologies for reviving such an old thread but this is the exact issue my dell XPS is having. Unfortunately the user, Roverduck, who posted his solution wasn’t very clear about the actual steps he took to fix his SSD. If anyone can clear up exactly what he means that would be a tremendous help.

In his solution Roverduck mentions changing the bios controller from AHCI to RAID which I have done. However his next step is not very clear to me and dell support was less then helpful. Roverduck states “today I changed it back again to RAID to force what looks like a BIOS based element of the IRST to appear. I then was able to delete the metadata by erasing the disk using this utility.” What does he mean by forcing a BIOS based element of the IRST to appear? Clearly my goal is to erase the metadata by erasing the disk as Roverduck mentions but I can not figure out how to do that and nothing in the BIOS mentions anything about the IRST or deleting the metadata. 

Any clear instructions on what Roverduck means would be greatly appreciated, thank you!

Bumping thread to try to get answer

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What is going on here? Can none of you explain the steps that Roverduck used to fix his system?

Bumped again..

Bumping again for answer.

GDay physikos

I found IRST showing the SSD as incompatible and the machine slowed right down so the HDD wasn't being cached.

This is how I fixed the problem on my XPS8700

The BIOS showed the SSD was still there but Windows 10 couldn't see it, neither Disk Management nor the command line utility Diskpart.  I read somewhere that the BIOS Secure Boot option was incompatible with IRST caching so I turned it off in the BIOS and restarted.  Bingo! The Intel BIOS utility came up during the boot sequence and I was able to use it to remove the SSD, this is a different utility to the normal BIOS options.  This is not risky to your data or OS as it is all on your HDD.  After this Windows Disk management showed the SSD but it was uninitialised.  Leave it that way, don't format it or give it a letter, that allows you to use it as a drive on its own but not as a cache.

After restarting IRST showed the SSD with a green flag and it was no longer incompatible.  But caching still didn't work.  There was no option to accelerate the HDD in the performance button of IRST.  So I re-checked the BIOS and found that the disk controller had somehow got into AHCI mode, it has to be in RAID mode so I changed it to that and re-started.

The boot threw an error so I reverted to AHCI in the BIOS.  Back in windows I used msconfig to set windows to start in safe mode with networking, restarted and reset the BIOS to RAID.  Once in safe mode I checked the disk drivers and found I was using RAID drivers, so I updated them and restarted in normal mode this time without error.

At this stage I found the Intel RST process was not running and IRST still didn't allow me to accelerate the drive.  So I uninstalled IRST and reinstalled the original version from Dell.  After another restart IRST was running OK and gave me the option to accelerate the HDD.  At this stage all was well except during boot the Intel BIOS utility came up each time.  It was now showing the HDD as non RAID and the SSD as a cache.  I didn't want this showing as somebody might incautiously use it to change something so I re-enabled Secure Boot in the BIOS and the Intel utility no longer showed up during the boot sequence.  IRST still works and the HDD is now cached as it should be.  It seems the secure boot option doesn't actually interfere with caching but hides the utility that lets you clean up the incompatible SSD.

Some of the suggestions around to fix this problem such as creating the SSD as a hibernation partition and leaving the BIOS disk controller in AHCI mode are quite wrong in my experience.  I hope your fix runs smoother than mine as this took about 6 hours to figure out with lots of red herrings about other issues with IRST and Windows. 

Good luck

Syncretic

GDay Roverduck

You may have cleaned up the SSD so that it no longer throws a warning but if the BIOS has the disk controller set to AHCI the SSD is not caching.  Look at the icon for the SSD in RST and compare with the examples in RST help, I think you will find it is just an uninitialised drive that is not caching your HDD, the icons are different.  Can you see acceleration options in RST?  If not the drive is not caching.  You have to see the acceleration options and the choice of which HDD to cache.

Hi All,

I have had exactly the same problem with IRST reporting a SSD problem after having to reload my Windows installation following a file corruption that it could not repair. As I have not changed my BIOS settings I followed the normal routine for reloading Windows from a USB stick. I must admit that I did not think about what this meant for the SSD as I assumed, incorrectly it would seem, that the Windows hardware survey and installation would take car of this.

Only some time after I had reloaded Windows and was putting back my applications and lost file did IRST cut in to inform me that the SSD was incompatible and was not functioning. I could see that the mSATA SSD was visible in the BIOS but did not appear in Windows Device Manager or Disk Manager, yet IRST clearly was aware of its existence.

After reviewing all the previous posts on this issue I tried to see if any of the suggestions would work for me. Firstly, I turned of secure boot and restarted to see if this mystery IRST boot utility would appear but nothing happened and nothing was changed. Then, somewhat apprehensively I must admit, I tried changing the boot controller setting form AHCI to RAID but all this did was to cause the boot-up to fail and I therefore changed it back to AHCI and restarted and, after doing a repair on the system Windows then booted okay again.

I find it astonishing that 6 years after someone first reported this problem that ther appears to be no definitive solution to correcting this issue. Even for someone reasonably IT savvy reloading their Windows installation is somewhat daunting but what I cannot understand is why, if IRST can see the SSD the initial hardware survey carried out by the Windows installer does not identify this as a potential problem. From earlier post it even looks like Dell support personnel may not know how to correctly handle this situation when repairing someone's system.

I could go back and start the whole reload again but I can find no procedure relating to this which would guarantee that I would not end up in exactly the same situation. I there is anyone out there who can authoritatively provide the information to either resolve this without having to reload Windows again or can explain how to start again to put this right it would be hugely appreciated.

For now as the system is working, albeit probably slower than it should do, I am tempted to leave it alone but I am concerned that this might lead to further problems in the future. Any informed advice would be appreciated.

Yours, hareyaap