Dell & Intel Matrix driver

[Interitus]

I have a friend with an XPS system that recently fell victim to the iastor.sys BSOD problem. His rig is a 3 year old XPS desktop that uses a single SATA drive. I've pulled his drive and fired it up in my rig at home and the drive definitely has some issues. CHKDSK found a couple bad sectors and moved a ton of files in the windows system folder. I know this drive right now has issues, it doesn't even sound healthy. (Think gobstoppers in a blender...that's what it sounds like) My question is this:

I'm picking him up a new drive from the egg, when it gets here I'll have it installed and reinstall his copy of Windows, but do the new versions of Intel's Matrix driver have the same problems with SATA/AHCI as the old ones? I'm sure he wouldn't notice if I just left it set up as ATA but it just bugs me to half-arse fix something

Personally I've never encountered this problem because all my Intel boards don't support AHCI when PATA optical drives are used. So I always run ATA anyways.

 

[robisbell]

have not seen that issue on any of the XPS line and with single or multiple sata hdd's. I think it was just a bad drive he got, is the unit under warranty, before you go buying parts that are covered by Dell.

 

[daveybrat]

Just set the controller back to standard ATA instead of AHCI. He won't see any real performance hit and you'll be able to install xp just fine without loading the F6 floppy driver.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I've seen Dell XP OEM restore CDs, that have Intel's RAID drivers slipstreamed into the install. Unfortunately, it's an old and buggy version of Intel's drivers. And for some reason, using F6 and supplying the more recent drivers always results in a BSOD at the end of the install. It's almost like the old slipstreamed drivers have priority over the F6 drivers. My only suggestion is to replace the old slipstreamed drivers with new slipstreamed drivers and re-install.