AHCI and fily system corruption

[velis]

OK, So I bought Asus P5K-E WiFi-AP + C2D E8400. That was in spring 2008.
I reinstalled my system (disks in IDE mode) and everything was fine. No problems, comp ran fast and without hiccups.

Then I bought 750GB Samsung SpinPoint F1 HD753LJ at the end of august.
Since this was the fastest drive in my system, I decided to reinstall my WinXP again.
But this time I switched the controller to AHCI mode (not RAID).
I slipstreamed the drivers to the XP setup CD and installed the system just fine.

Everything was great for a while. The system was super responsive and super fast, although I don't know whether this was due to faster Samsung disk or because of AHCI mode.

But after a while, I got my first automatic boot-up chkdsk. Stage 2 found some index corruption and corrected it. I paid little attention to this (it was a one time event).

But only some 2 weeks ater, I got another chkdsk. And then windows started warning me about unreadable files even while computer was running.

I now have regular boot-time chkdsk every week, and the list of corrupted indexes is sometimes really long.

I guess it's only a matter of time when corruption will occur on the indexes that include some critical system files and I will be unable to boot.

I do have the partition backed up with Norton Ghost, just after the install of most applications so I'm not really worried about non-boot.

But I've still got a problem on my hands that I never experienced before and on top of that it's a potentially dangerous stuff. Like losing tons of my data I spent accumulating / working on for years. I back up most of the stuff, but not all of it since some are downloaded files and they also take too much space.

I tried to revert to IDE mode to see if that was the culprit, but XP just BSOD's very soon into the boot process.

So - can anyone tell me what the heck is going on in my computer?
Is there any way to revert to IDE mode except reinstalling XP?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[TemjinGold]

You might just have a corrupt install. I would back up what I can and reinstall Windows (perhaps under IDE mode as the different in speed is not much.)

 

[velis]

I forgot to mention that I also updated the Matrix Storage drivers to the latest version in the mean time.
Corrupt install is a possibility though even it would also be my first. I reinstall windows pretty regularly, once in half a year, usually.
I agree that speed difference isn't much. Better said - it's not as much to be worth data corruption.

 

[RebateMonger]

Have you:

1) Run memory diagnostics?
2) Run hard drive diagnostics?

Overclocking anything?

 

[heymrdj]

1. Back up the drive ASAP if you have important files

2. Run HD diagnostics. I think you have the classic signs of a failing HD.

 

[el3ctroded]

It's definately a HDD failing. Backup now or expect to loose it. Also, contact the mfg and get it warranty replaced. Most drives have a 3yr warranty. Some only have 1yr and others have 5yr. I think samsung std warranty is 3yr.

 

[velis]

I run memory diag every time i change overclock settings. Currently my comp is overclocked very moderately (3.3 GHz). Previously I had it overclocked to 3.8 or even 4.6 and it still worked fine. So I'm sure it's either HD or AHCI that's the culprit here.

How do I run HD diag?
Where do I get SW for that?

 

[BlueAcolyte]

Use HD Tune or your manufacturer tools. (For Samsung, it's called ES-Tool.)

 

[RebateMonger]

I didn't see whether you'd examined the System Event logs looking for "Disk", "NTFS", or "FTDISK" errors. Check the Application Event logs, too, just in case.

 

[velis]

Well, found HUTIL program on samsung site. Ran full diag and it found nothing. Though I was watching it for the first 10% and occasionally it progressed very slowly + printed something on the bottom line. However the printout was too fast for me to read.
I had to change disk mode to IDE to make the utility work. In AHCI mode it didn't find any disks.

I found the following events of note in System log:
error in iaStor - The device \Device\Ide\IaStor0 failed to respond within timeout period //This is the samsung disk
error in ntfs - The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on C: // this was followed by a boot time chkdsk - no visible warnings were displayed on the desktop prior to restart

These timeout errors are just about as frequent as ntfs errors in event log, but they do not necessarily appear on the same date.

So what can I do about utility finding nothing, but disk still failing?
Does anybody know how I can install IDE drivers without breaking the entire XP install?

 

[VeryCharBroiled]

generic IDE drivers are built in and will work till you get the better chipset specific ones. chipset drivers are at the mobo/chipset manufacturers site. no reinstall should be needed.

as for that corruption/timeouts, if you are overclocking you can push the internal PCI bus (or whatever bus is being used to communicate with the drive) that the drive hangs off of. eventually it writes corrupt data as you have gone past the buses limits. the corruption/timeouts is from the bus garbling data to or from the drive. this has happened to me. HD was perfectly fine hardware wise, it just got corrupted from the bus overclock. with a reinstall and saner overclocks it was fine for years. depends on how the mobo overclocks and BIOS setting as to whether the PCI bus (or whatever) is overclocked too. some boards can lock the bus speed independently of other speeds, some ramp it up or down with the main clock.

this may not be your problem but I figure Id toss it out.

 

[velis]

Nope, I have the bus set to 100 MHz in BIOS. If this was the problem, the overclock would never have been able to reach 4.6 GHz since there's no device that would be able to work with 150+ MHz bus.
Thanks for helping anyway.

As for ide drivers - it seems I'd have to at least disable the AHCI driver if I try to revert, but I don't think the IDE drivers are even installed right now since the setup simply found AHCI controller and not an IDE one. Anyway, I just get a BSOD if I try to set the disks in IDE mode.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: velis
Anyway, I just get a BSOD if I try to set the disks in IDE mode.

Warning: I've NEVER set any of my PCs to ACHI mode, so I have zero hands-on experience in this area. I've done lots of IDE, SATA, and SCSI RAID stuff, but never AHCI mode. All of my non-RAID SATA controllers are set for IDE compatiblity mode.

Try this:

1) Boot Windows in AHCI mode.
2) In Device Manager, "Update the driver" for the disk hard drive controller to the generic Microsoft IDE controller ("Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller").
3) Reboot the PC.
4) On reboot, enter the BIOS and set the SATA controller to "IDE Compatibility Mode".
5) Save the BIOS settings and let the PC reboot.

When Windows comes up, it should now be looking for a generic IDE controller, which you've just enabled in the BIOS. Windows will (hopefully) boot.

 

[velis]

Thanks, RebateMonger, for the tip.
Unfortunately it didn't work. The system went into BSOD when this was done.

Since I had to restore from Ghost image anyway, I decided to play a bit more.
So I looked up in registry all iaStor.sys entries (there are 2, actually) and deleted the branches.
I also tried together with uninstalling Intel Matrix Storage drivers that offer some advice on reverting to IDE, but I suppose those instructions only help when the Matrix Storage drivers would be installed in an IDE mode WinXP setup. That is however impossible since it refuses to install if the system is not already in AHCI mode

So I tried some 5 - 6 times with various combinations, all of them giving me a non-descriptive BSOD (no .sys, just an address of failure)

One interesting tidbit: After about 4 tries, Ghost would always abort restore if I didn't select image verification. In the middle of the process 2 of 3 disks simply "dissappeared". Only the Samsung disk remained visible.

I guess my only option of reverting back to IDE mode is to reinstall the OS

 

[velis]

Just thought I'd post an update to this:
I was having increasing problems with this. Disks would disappear at random even during work (blue screen + restart), BIOS would fail to detect the disks at all when this happened. Otherwise, it's been a long time since I've had corruption.

Anyway, I got myself an intel X25-M to use as system.
After I plugged it in, the mobo had serious problems detecting this disk in BIOS POST. Initially it went well, detected just fine, but after some 3-4 hours, I couldn't get it to detect the disk at all any more.

Switched to IDE mode, now everything works as charm.
It seems I have a faulty NB. With this problem being so sporadic, I never got around to RMAing the board since I'd have to wait a month at minimum before they decided that I was correct and replaced the mobo.

Oh well, IDE mode is just as fine. As long as it works. I just activated AHCI because some folks were advertizing its performance so much. Turns out, there are more or less zero benefits.

 

[Griswold]

AHCI is good for two things mostly:

eSATA hotplugging
NCQ

If you own a SSD, you certainly want NCQ. Otherwise you're sacrificing much of what makes SSDs so great: extremely fast random file access. Without NCQ, an SSD simply will not perform at its peak. The A SSD benchmark tool is a nice indicator for that. The 4k-64 performance will plummeth without AHCI (NCQ).

For HDDs, NCQ may, under some conditions, also show benefits, but thats mostly under server workloads.

That said, theres no reason to not use AHCI unless there are problems. There are a few nvidia and amd chipsets generations that are known for faulty AHCI implementation, unfortunately.