RST / SSD Caching issue FIXED - not thanks to Dell/AW and thanks a member!

Long story short.. I wanted to share my accolades for forum member ssj92 who spent over an hour on skype with me and doing screen shares getting what Dell/AW support screwed up fixed..

Back when I first got the AW 17, I had a major problem with the power supply not being recognized and the computer not allowing the NV770's to work as a result.

I called AW/DELL and we went thru and re-flashed the BIOS then setup windows and all the drivers from scratch to get this sorted out.... which is fine EXCEPT they forgot to setup my 60GB Cache with smart cache technology that I paid good money for. I didn't notice the oversight until I went to tweak the setting on the 17 to "maximum" since I noticed it was running quite slow...

Come to find out, the entire cache drive was not setup... the BIOS setting had to be in RAID and it was not... and simply changing it was causing a blue screen and problems with windows..

I called DELL/AW support this morning and spoke to a young lady who did a screen share and came to the conclusion that the only thing to do was to re-install windows all over again... that there was, and I quote "NO OTHER WAY" to do this. I would then have to spend the better part of a day downloading all the STEAM games that occupy 200GB plus on my computer, and re-do all my settings .. sigh..

Long story short, member ssj92 went thru and got it working thru a safe mode re-install of the drivers and then it worked fine in what only took 10 min... we did it via a skype call...


thank you ssj92!! thank you notebookreview!

 

Sweet! Glad to hear you got fixed up with ssj92's help.

In case anyone else makes the mistake of installing Windows with the BIOS set to AHCI instead of RAID--there are some folks actually telling them to set the BIOS AHCI due to lack of understanding concerning the functionality limitations they are introducing by doing so--instructions to fix this mistake are in the first post of this thread: http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...es-sata-iii-ssd-upgrade-raid0-discussion.html.

 

Hrmm...I only set mine to AHCI because that's the only way the box would install Win7 from USB key. Since everything is running ok I should just leave it but next time I reinstall, how do you get Win7 to install from USB key in RAID mode? What exactly is not so good about leaving the box in AHCI mode (I looked through the other thread but it's copiously large and I couldn't read through it all)?

 

Essentially everything you need to know about on the subject is in post #1. No need to read the entire thread.

You have to use the Intel RST F6 drivers. Without the F6 drivers Windows 7 setup does not recognize the RAID array. I always unzip the F6 drivers to the root directory of the USB stick.

During Windows 7 setup you click the button to "Load Driver" and point Windows to where those extracted files are located. You will then see the device name populate the selection window. Select it and then the installation will complete. This is also explained in the opening post in the thread I linked above.

You don't need to reinstall Windows to correct this. Look toward the end of that same opening post for instructions how to correct it. If you have installed Intel Rapid Storage Technology in Windows, once you do the simple registry edit you can change the BIOS setting from AHCI to RAID.

 

Glad to be of assistance. Sadly my AW17 was delayed (When I oredered my precision m4800, it was delayed three times and took more than a month to come). Hopefully that doesn't happen to my 17.

If anyone needs to go from AHCI to RAID all they have to do is go to the registry editor and look up the folders (In HKLM) "msahci" "iastorV" and "iastor". There should be an entry called "start" in all three. It should be set to "0". If that doesn't solve it, going to safe mode should allow the driver to install itself.

 

ssj92.... It's the oddest thing, anytime you make a minor change to the order, they delay it..

I simply added 2 year warranty and they added 7 days to my delivery date... What's odd is, I could have canceled the computer and re-ordered it and gotten it faster...

Dell needs to fix that.

Again, not sure how to bump someone's rep on here, but this guy is a windows Guru, and with a bright future.