Sager NP9150 Crucial M4 MSATA intermittent failure to boot with UEFI

This may be a unique problem since I can't find anybody else talking about it.

I have a Sager NP9150 with a Crucial M4 MSATA (256GB) as the boot drive and a Toshiba Hard Drive for data storage.

It's running Windows 8 with UEFI set up and normally it boots just fine.

Once in a while (maybe once a month for the past six since I set it up) when I put the computer to sleep it locks up. I force start it and it will no longer recognize the M4 in the BIOS.

My fix has been inconsistent but it is basically resetting the BIOS to default and playing around with the various settings rebooting a dozen times typically with various settings until it finally recognizes the MSATA again and all is good. Sometimes it will recognize the MSATA with UEFI on or off as I fiddle with the BIOS settings. There doesn't seem to be any pattern or one thing that I must do to get it to work but changing and saving the BIOS settings over and over is the only way. Just rebooting the machine over and over doesn't seem to work....I must make some small change to the BIOS and save it...reboot...and repeat until the MSATA is seen again and all is good for a month or so.

Normally in the "Boot" tab of the BIOS setup when "Windows 8" is selected the option under "Boot Option Priorities" should be "Windows Boot Manager" but this option is missing until I can get the MSATA recognized again.

It's very scary when this happens but I've always been able to recover. Removing and re-seating the MSATA doesn't seem to have any effect.

I'm assuming there is some bug in the firmware for either the Sager or the M4 that is causing this. Crucial has released an updated firmware but warn that it may not work with UEFI.

I'm hoping someone else has seen this and knows of a solution or has more information.

 

updating the firmware of ur msata drive would be the first thing i would try, to be honest

 

Agreed with jaybee83. Especially the Crucial M4 drives, i know they've released some firmware updates to address some issues. Those are ones that the first thing you want to do is update it.

 

Yes, the M4's seem to have a firmware issue as of late. Try updating it as a first resort: Crucial.com Product Downloads - Firmware Updates

 

It happened again and I noticed that my DVD drive isn't recognized either so it's probably more of a Sager issue than the M4. And Crucial stated their latest firmware update may not work on UEFI setups.

This time I was able to recover by selecting RAID, then allowing the RAID controller to recognize the M4, then reboot and set it back to AHCI. Weird.

Also, the problem seems to occur when I put the computer to sleep and it doesn't sleep, it just locks up and I have to reboot it. Again, very rare and inconsistent but I'll look into the M4 firmware again.

 

check and see if there is a newer firmware than urs available, but one that is still older than the most current one. maybe that´ll suffice to correct that issue and still provide u with UEFI functionality

 

At least they (Crucial) are informative:

Sounds like a case by case problem. If you try it, please let us know what happens!

 

I had exactly the same problem (NP9150, crucial m4 SSD not recognized intermittently).

first to get it recognized i followed this procedure:
Why did my SSD "disappear" from my system? - Crucial Community

then updated the firmware to 070H which specifically addresses this issue "Resolved a power-up timing issue that could result in a drive hang, resulting in an inability to communicate with the host computer. The hang condition would typically occur during power-up or resume from Sleep or Hibernate. Most often, a new power cycle will clear the condition and allow normal operations to continue. The failure mode has only been observed in factory test. The failure mode is believed to have been contained to the factory. This fix is being implemented for all new builds, for all form factors, as a precautionary measure. The fix may be implemented in the field, as desired, to prevent occurrence of this boot-time failure. To date, no known field returns have been shown to be related to this issue. A failure of this type would typically be recoverable by a system reset."

 

To recover the drive you leave the system idle in the bios screen for 10-20 mins to reset the firmware if it happens again.