Schell77: you have been following this problem from the very beginning (release of Vista) and you have the same machine as mine. You have participated in a number of forums about this topic and I am interested in your feedback.
(Everyone....the Dimension 9200 is basically the same as the XPS 410).
Just a little background here, my PC is running great now in a dual boot setup, however, raid has been taken out of the picture all together on my PC with the BIOS parameter changed from raid on to autodetect. (Runs great, I just can't use any type of raid array right now). BUT I have been following this issue to see its resolution so I'll know when/if I can use Raid under Vista in the future.
"Moving the two hard drives and the one optical drive on my XPS-410 from SATA ports 0 through 2 to ports 3 through 5 has made no difference whatever for me, sorry to say. I still get the "
\Device\Ide\iaStor0, did not respond within the timeout period" Events in the System log, and chkdsk C: /f on startup continues to reveal ongoing hard disk corruption.
Everyone, be sure you're running chkdsk regularly, and not just waiting for NTFS corruption to take the form of system faults or crashed appliations."
Have you downloaded the latest BIOS update? Have you downloaded the latest firmware for your DVD drive? If so, (AND you have tried to install Vista again under the "raid on" parameter), I would be very curious to know the outcome. I am sure others would as well. I appreciate any feedback :smileyhappy:
Everyone, I think Schell makes a good point here while stating you should be aware of possible "underlying" error events that might be lurking in the background (corrupting your system). Schell has more knowledge than me. However, I agree 100 percent in that it is not enough to "think" the problem is resolved without running chkdsk regularly AND to KNOW that there is no corruption going on. It is unfortunate that Dell did not SPECIFICALLY address the iaStorO (raid problem) under the new BIOS and firmware upgrades. Personally, I am all up for possible fixes (and certain things don't hurt to try). BUT, it is not enough to just assume that something is fixed without further action unless you don't mind big surprises down the road! This last part is just my 2 cents worth and commentary.
Has anyone else done recently downloaded these new updates from Dell AND have you checked your disk(s) for errors as Schell described? If so, I think this would be EXCELLENT feedback for everyone on this topic.
I am running Raid 0 on my system. I was originally able to resolve the problem by swapping the sata ports used by my DVD drives. Before the DVD firmware update, I tested swapping the ports back and the problem came back. I applied the DVD firmware update, and again swapped the cable back to the troublesome configuration, and the problem was gone. For me it appears that the DVD firmware update has eliminated the problem
I just wanted to let everybody know that reinstalling Vista from the DVD does solve this issue. What a pain in the behind to order a brand new 9200 from Dell and have it practically DOA. I agree they should never have shipped the PC with this problem.
Dell, this disappoints me. I have been a valued lease customer for years, but this (and the constant harrassing calls from your lease department in India) are really making me think hard. Clean it up!
After reinstalling VISTA without using the RAID setting and having no issues, I added another RAID Card. Adaptec makes a PCI e 4x SATA RAID. for around $100 (from Office Depot). No cables.
I installed 2 Seagate 250 GB drives in the bays below DVD ROM. Tight fit but works. We will see about heat. I configured a RAID 0. Used Disk Mgmt to format it as my X: drive. Did not realize that I had to remove jumpers to get the hard drives to to SATA II.
I use the mirror to install games. Definitely loads faster!
I now have the following configuration:
1 Dell(WD) 160GB 10k SATA II (OS)
2. Seagate 320 GB SATA II (Data)
3 2 x 250 GB Seagate SATA II as a stripe set.
I install the games on the stripe, but back up them up to a external drive. If I lose the stripe I still have the game.
So far I have installed
Silent Hunter 4
IL 2 Sturmovik 1946
and for the heck of it CFS 3
All of them work on VISTA Ultimate x64. CFS 3 even works without compatibility mode.
The Adaptec RAID is a 1430A. They just released VISTA drivers.
Their Storage Manager is a bit hard to find for Vista:
I many others here I have been frustrated with the Intel Storage Matrix with Vista. I found this recent Intel note (dated 3/30/07) regarding this issue that I would like to share:
It worked for me! (while everything else I read didn't).
I bought a Dell XPS 410 a couple weeks ago. I moved over my two Western Digital 400GB SATA drives from my old XP system (that was also using the Intel Storage Matrix). No matter what I did I could not get Vista to fully install (except once). It would hang, blue screen, etc. I tried moving my CD/DVD ports around (as others had claimed worked for them), installed the latest driver during install, install with one drive, the other drive, but nothing worked. Except the one time I did get Vista installed it totally cratered 2 days later from NTFS corruption problems. My Event Viewer was saturated with iastor Event 9 timeout errors. Sometimes I would also hear my hard drives "clunk" as though they were powering off. Tests of the hard drives showed they were fine. I was at a loss. No RAID? I specifically bought this model partly because it had RAID built in.
After reading the Intel note I thought I would try again (I was running without RAID on one drive so I had the other just sitting). With RAID set to ON in the BIOS I installed Vista to a single hard drive but I first moved it to port 5 and only used a single CD/DVD drive connected to port 4. Vista installed without problems - wow!!!! I removed the registry entries detailed in the Intel note and noticed that it contained sub-entries for ports 0-2 (hmmmm.... my hard drives have always been installed on those ports until now). I moved the hard drive back to port 0 (I probably could have left it - don't know) and am watching closely for any errors in the event log or chkdsk errors upon startup. Keeping my fingers crossed!
I would like to note that moving drives from one port to another is only a workaround as it does not "FIX" the problem.
My Dell XPS 410 is working like a charm now that I use the previously-posted Intel instructions. I've transferred 250GB data from another hard drive, installed all my applications, etc. and still have no iastor event errors or NTFS errors. Hopefully it stays that way...
Do any of you have the Phillips DVD drive? If so, have you been to support.dell.com and updated your firmware to the latest release for your Phillips DVD drive? Have you updated your BIOS to the very latest edition?
I cannot say for others. However, (for my machine) either one or both of these actions fixed the iaStor) errors in my PC which finally allowed me to install raid with no problems...unbelievably!
Also, have all of you seen the post by Intel? After 2 months of saying they could not "replicate" the problem, it seems Intel has FINALLY acknowledged the issues with the IaStor errors and raid problems in certain chipsets. See their link below:
I know a lot of what I am saying is a repeat of other users like posterboy, jored, and jberd. However, I "do" want to emphasize that I took no other action. I did not move the Sata ports. (My 2 hard drives remain on ports 0 and 1, DVD drive on Sata port 2 and DVD-RW on port 3 and raid is set to on in the BIOS. I made the transition back to "raid on" in the BIOS with a raid 0 array (as of a few days ago). So far things are running great....just with the firmware and BIOS update.
So even if you don't have a Phillips DVD drive, you might want to check to see if there is a firmware update for your particular DVD brand. Also, make sure your BIOS is updated to the latest one.
I have the most recent firmware for my optical drive
I have applied the registry changes advised in the Intel posting
I have moved the optical drive to SATA 5
I have run the Intel Matrix utility, checked the RAID volumes and marked them as normal.
All this on the replacement machine
Still getting cascades of iaStor errors, freezes and the RAID ports marked in red with a problem in the BIOS start up screen when I even mildly stress the machine.
You're not alone. I'm on my second system now, and have tried all the fixes that made sense, and some that didn't, and stll have the same problem. There is obviosuly some problem at a core architecture level that Dell needs to figure out - soon I hope, I hate to think I paid this much for a system that I can't use for what I need it to do...
Just for information, I've removed the registry entries as directed by Intel and apart from two iastor events before I rebooted I haven't had a hang/iastor error for 3 days now.
In all my reading on this problem I have never once seen anybody say to move their hard drive SATA ports. If you continue to have these problems try moving ALL your SATA devices (particularly your hard drives) to ports 3 and higher (if possible). Make sure you enable the SATA ports in your BIOS if they are not already. I was successful with with hard drive on the last SATA port (port 5) for my Vista installation whereas moving all the other optical drives did nothing for me.
It describes the same problem and solutions but seems not to have made the link to the iaStor errors. Dell Liaison seem to have been watching it closely and making informative comments.
Prior to Intel’s announcement regarding the registry hack, I tried all the workarounds that had success claimed for them, including relocating the SATA drives to the higher ports and rebuilding Vista with the “leaked” Intel version 7 drivers. No luck. I continued to have Event ID 9 Errors in the System log (“The device…did not respond within the timeout period”), NTFS corruption, and then application and OS crashes once the file corruption got bad enough. I also had glitches in Windows Media Player when I connected to a VPN through a Cisco VPN client.
At one point I tried installing a HighPoint RocketRAID 2310 card and rebuilding Vista Business from scratch. Interestingly I could not get this to work well either. I continued to get Event ID 9 Errors in the System log (“The device, \Device\Scsi\2310_001, did not respond within the timeout period.”), and the OS would hang coming out of sleep mode (accompanied with Event ID 41 Criticals in the System log).
Today I’ve removed the RocketRAID and have bailed out of hardware RAID completely. I’ve been running completely RAID free now for one month. I split the two drives into separate SATA entities (with RAID turned off in the BIOS), and rebuilt the OS with Vista Business. So far the results have been quite acceptable, with only a half-point cost in the disk data transfer rate in the Windows Experience Index (from 5.9 to 5.5) compared with using RAID 0. There have been only occasional issues flagged by CHKDSK /F on the system drive on three bootups so far, the issues being minor (free space marked as allocated). No errors on the D: drive, which I’ve manually load balanced by moving most data files, most applications, the CSC cache (for offline files) and the Windows Vista Desktop Search indexes there, leaving the C: drive for the OS. I also use a ReadyBoost USB key for the pagefile. There have been no Event ID 9s of course, and the WMP and Cisco VPN glitches are gone too.
ScanPST reports errors on my main PST pretty regularly, but that may be common with Office 2007…too soon to tell. SFC /scannow reported errors on two occasions while I was building the system. One of these followed relocation of the index files to D: (SFC understandably finding integrity errors in this case). There have been no SFC errors reported since then. My situation is not perfect, but I at least have a functional system, being kept on a short leash with constant monitoring of the disk system. We should all do likewise, running chkdsk /f on startup, running sfc /scannow occasionally (though this often detects issues not related to disk/NTFS corruption), and if we run Outlook 2007, runing ScanPST regularly too, keeping in mind that error detections seem to be common with this tool even if your file system is OK.
Although the results from the Intel registry hack seem encouraging, I’m not eager to forfeit another two weeks of work to get what appears to be only a modest performance improvement between two SATA drives manually load balanced and a RAID0 configuration. I’ll probably sit on the current configuration for several more weeks, and perhaps until SP1.
scott784
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March 31st, 2007 19:00
Everyone, I think Schell makes a good point here while stating you should be aware of possible "underlying" error events that might be lurking in the background (corrupting your system). Schell has more knowledge than me. However, I agree 100 percent in that it is not enough to "think" the problem is resolved without running chkdsk regularly AND to KNOW that there is no corruption going on. It is unfortunate that Dell did not SPECIFICALLY address the iaStorO (raid problem) under the new BIOS and firmware upgrades. Personally, I am all up for possible fixes (and certain things don't hurt to try). BUT, it is not enough to just assume that something is fixed without further action unless you don't mind big surprises down the road! This last part is just my 2 cents worth and commentary.
Has anyone else done recently downloaded these new updates from Dell AND have you checked your disk(s) for errors as Schell described? If so, I think this would be EXCELLENT feedback for everyone on this topic.
Message Edited by scott784 on 03-31-2007 05:19 PM
PosterBoy
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G35REX
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jberd126
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scott784
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April 15th, 2007 02:00
I know a lot of what I am saying is a repeat of other users like posterboy, jored, and jberd. However, I "do" want to emphasize that I took no other action. I did not move the Sata ports. (My 2 hard drives remain on ports 0 and 1, DVD drive on Sata port 2 and DVD-RW on port 3 and raid is set to on in the BIOS. I made the transition back to "raid on" in the BIOS with a raid 0 array (as of a few days ago). So far things are running great....just with the firmware and BIOS update.
So even if you don't have a Phillips DVD drive, you might want to check to see if there is a firmware update for your particular DVD brand. Also, make sure your BIOS is updated to the latest one.
Message Edited by scott784 on 04-14-2007 11:41 PM
Docrico
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mr_wizard
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DELL-Chris M
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If you had/have this error, I need the following sent to me in a private message:
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SBurdin
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Schell77
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April 30th, 2007 00:00
Prior to Intel’s announcement regarding the registry hack, I tried all the workarounds that had success claimed for them, including relocating the SATA drives to the higher ports and rebuilding Vista with the “leaked” Intel version 7 drivers. No luck. I continued to have Event ID 9 Errors in the System log (“The device…did not respond within the timeout period”), NTFS corruption, and then application and OS crashes once the file corruption got bad enough. I also had glitches in Windows Media Player when I connected to a VPN through a Cisco VPN client.
At one point I tried installing a HighPoint RocketRAID 2310 card and rebuilding Vista Business from scratch. Interestingly I could not get this to work well either. I continued to get Event ID 9 Errors in the System log (“The device, \Device\Scsi\2310_001, did not respond within the timeout period.”), and the OS would hang coming out of sleep mode (accompanied with Event ID 41 Criticals in the System log).
Today I’ve removed the RocketRAID and have bailed out of hardware RAID completely. I’ve been running completely RAID free now for one month. I split the two drives into separate SATA entities (with RAID turned off in the BIOS), and rebuilt the OS with Vista Business. So far the results have been quite acceptable, with only a half-point cost in the disk data transfer rate in the Windows Experience Index (from 5.9 to 5.5) compared with using RAID 0. There have been only occasional issues flagged by CHKDSK /F on the system drive on three bootups so far, the issues being minor (free space marked as allocated). No errors on the D: drive, which I’ve manually load balanced by moving most data files, most applications, the CSC cache (for offline files) and the Windows Vista Desktop Search indexes there, leaving the C: drive for the OS. I also use a ReadyBoost USB key for the pagefile. There have been no Event ID 9s of course, and the WMP and Cisco VPN glitches are gone too.
ScanPST reports errors on my main PST pretty regularly, but that may be common with Office 2007…too soon to tell. SFC /scannow reported errors on two occasions while I was building the system. One of these followed relocation of the index files to D: (SFC understandably finding integrity errors in this case). There have been no SFC errors reported since then. My situation is not perfect, but I at least have a functional system, being kept on a short leash with constant monitoring of the disk system. We should all do likewise, running chkdsk /f on startup, running sfc /scannow occasionally (though this often detects issues not related to disk/NTFS corruption), and if we run Outlook 2007, runing ScanPST regularly too, keeping in mind that error detections seem to be common with this tool even if your file system is OK.
Although the results from the Intel registry hack seem encouraging, I’m not eager to forfeit another two weeks of work to get what appears to be only a modest performance improvement between two SATA drives manually load balanced and a RAID0 configuration. I’ll probably sit on the current configuration for several more weeks, and perhaps until SP1.
Message Edited by Schell77 on 04-29-2007 08:51 PM
Message Edited by Schell77 on 04-29-2007 08:51 PM