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instability issues due to SSD, controller or Windows 7 installation

P

pavel-

n00b
Joined
Jun 6, 2011
Messages
5
Hello,

So a few days ago I installed Dota2 and after playing a bit the next day I began experiencing some severe instability issues on my machine.

The issues are:
  • applications become unresponsive shortly after booting, once this begins happening all applications stop responding and I have to hard reboot the pc (the mouse and keyboard remain operable)
  • sometimes following reboot, the pc fails to detect the drive and tries to boot from the wrong hard disk, rebooting sometimes fixes the issue and after adjusting the boot order, the system boots into Windows

This may point to a problem in the drive itself (it's a Crucial M4 64GB SSD) or the controller, or could be an entirely new issue -- I don't really know where to begin in diagnosing it. The OS being used is Windows 7 Professional. (Motherboard is ASRock Extreme4, don't recall the generation but I purchased it in June 2011 -- both of the SSDs are plugged into the SATAIII ports governed by the Intel controller, not Marvell).

Dota2 was installed on another SSD in the pc that is used solely for apps/games (no OS).

Could this be a software issue (corrupt OS files?) Or does the boot order changing and problems with drive detection point to drive or controller problems? How would you recommend I proceed with testing/diagnosis?

Things I've tried:
  • Swapped the 2 SSDs between the two SATAIII ports, same issue
  • Booted using Ubuntu LiveCD, checked dmesg and found no errors or warnings, however, fdisk -l does NOT list the drive as connected, hence I'm unable to mount it
  • When I managed to boot successfully into Windows I've run a number of HD Tune Pro diagnostics and found no errors
Any advice or ideas appreciated. (I've posted this on a couple other tech forums but have yet to receive any additional responses) Thank you.
 
Last edited:
Hey Pavel

The issue of the drive sometimes not showing at boot is a known Crucial M4 issue and you need to get on latest firmware. This sometimes happens when PC crashes and it couldnt complete a write - when it powers back up it attempts to resolve the torn write and appears unresponsive to the PC. I'm actuality if you had paused at the bios, waited 20-30sec until the HDD activity led flashed and hit ctrl-alt-del it would be picked up by bios fine. Anyway, the solution is updating firmware because the issue was addressed several revs ago

My guess is the other issues are side effects of the base issue and will clear up after the update. Went through it myself. Drive was perfect afterward
 
odditory said:
Hey Pavel
...
Anyway, the solution is updating firmware because the issue was addressed several revs ago
...
Click to expand...

Hey odditory,

Indeed, this seems to have taken care of the problem, I'm still running some tests to make sure everything is stable, but any of the aforementioned issues have not reoccurred since updating to the newest firmware (I had to plug the drive into a SATAII port on my board before the update utility would recognize it on boot).

Thanks.
 
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