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This is tl;dr, but I always forget how I resolve things unless I write it down, and I encountered one bit of obscure nonsense after another that all started with the new version of Samsung Magician causing a BSOD in iastora.sys when the computer tried to sleep. I found some of the solutions by googling, but each one was a separate hunt, and it took a while, so maybe having them all in one place will help someone down the line.
The problem
I went to do some errands and came home to a DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE BSOD on my Windows 7x64 Z87 system, while I was expecting the usual rock-solid sleeping computer that's never BSODed in its life.
First aggravation - Difficulty installing WinDbg after a BSOD
I tried installed WinDbg, but it failed, erroring out with a message suggesting I open a local file that doesn't exist for more info on the error. Thanks, Microsoft. I eventually found through googling and log files I needed to uninstall the Visual C++ 10 Redistributables, because the Debugging Tools installer desperately needed to install outdated versions of these packages. Uninstalling them allowed the Debugging Tools installer to finish, and the Windows Update I subsequently performed did install the patch for these packages a second time, so at least that worked right.
Second aggravation - Samsung Magician facepalm
I loaded the minidump into WinDbg and found it was iastora.sys, the Intel RST ACHI driver, that wasn't responding, which led to the BSOD. Ultimately, I remembered I had installed Samsung Magician 4.3 the day before, ran it, but forgot it leaves itself running in the tray, and Windows 7 did me no favors by hiding the icon. Thanks, Samsung, and thanks again, Microsoft. Googling revealed other people had talked about this BSOD, and it has something to do with Samsung intentionally, silently, and most incompetently interfering with sleep, because they say their drives can have problems with sleep. Well, my 830 has slept thousands of times without issue before they "fixed" it for me and caused the first BSOD I've seen in years. (I later determined this does not occur when Magician isn't running. Just make sure you exit it from the notification area when you're done with it and remove it from your startup folder so it doesn't load when you boot.)
Third aggravation - Entering hybrid sleep twice in a row doesn't work
While investigating the sleep issue, I temporarily enabled a profile that I forgot has hybrid sleep enabled. (I normally use regular sleep to avoid excessive writes to my SSD, and my APC XS1500 UPS will wake the computer to hibernate it if necessary, so it's just as safe.) I found the first hybrid sleep worked fine, but a second attempt done immediately after resuming would result in a black screen and an unresponsive, non-sleeping computer, that could only be brought back by a reset. When it came back (and not by resuming from hibernation, just a full reboot), the network was dead, and I had to restart again to get it back. Strangely, powering down instead of resetting it the first time kept the network alive. Explictly hibernating worked fine; it was just hybrid sleep that was borked. So now I'm really concerned that Samsung Magician has screwed up my rock-solid machine in myriad ways. (Why do I care? I hate mysterious problems on principle, and I use hybrid sleep on my other PC that the UPS cannot shut down, as it only supports shutting down the PC connected to it with USB.)
Fourth aggravation - intel.com
I went to intel.com to see if there was an update to the 12.5 RST driver I was using and found a recent 12.9 update under the 7x64 filter, and its readme had a few blurbs about sleep issues being fixed. It errored out at the end, so I went back to intel.com and saw this package was for their NUC motherboards, and the current driver for me was the one I was already using. Thanks, Intel. If your website wasn't haphazard enough, now you're sticking stuff I can't use in the place I've always looked. Now I'm getting really upset, and to make matters worse, I got a delayed "Reboot your computer" prompt. So I looked in Device Manager and found the failed installer had installed the driver anyway. I rolled back the driver and ended up with the standard Microsoft AHCI driver, and then I rebooted.
Resolution - Thanks, Microsoft (non-sarcastic, this time)
It turns out the standard Microsoft driver can hybrid sleep multiple times in a row just fine. It also seems to come out of regular sleep faster that Intel RST, in terms of making the keyboard immediately available. I don't know if Samsung Magician can kill it when the system tries to enter normal sleep, and I'm not planning to find out. I will never deal with Intel RST again unless I have to.
The problem
I went to do some errands and came home to a DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE BSOD on my Windows 7x64 Z87 system, while I was expecting the usual rock-solid sleeping computer that's never BSODed in its life.
First aggravation - Difficulty installing WinDbg after a BSOD
I tried installed WinDbg, but it failed, erroring out with a message suggesting I open a local file that doesn't exist for more info on the error. Thanks, Microsoft. I eventually found through googling and log files I needed to uninstall the Visual C++ 10 Redistributables, because the Debugging Tools installer desperately needed to install outdated versions of these packages. Uninstalling them allowed the Debugging Tools installer to finish, and the Windows Update I subsequently performed did install the patch for these packages a second time, so at least that worked right.
Second aggravation - Samsung Magician facepalm
I loaded the minidump into WinDbg and found it was iastora.sys, the Intel RST ACHI driver, that wasn't responding, which led to the BSOD. Ultimately, I remembered I had installed Samsung Magician 4.3 the day before, ran it, but forgot it leaves itself running in the tray, and Windows 7 did me no favors by hiding the icon. Thanks, Samsung, and thanks again, Microsoft. Googling revealed other people had talked about this BSOD, and it has something to do with Samsung intentionally, silently, and most incompetently interfering with sleep, because they say their drives can have problems with sleep. Well, my 830 has slept thousands of times without issue before they "fixed" it for me and caused the first BSOD I've seen in years. (I later determined this does not occur when Magician isn't running. Just make sure you exit it from the notification area when you're done with it and remove it from your startup folder so it doesn't load when you boot.)
Third aggravation - Entering hybrid sleep twice in a row doesn't work
While investigating the sleep issue, I temporarily enabled a profile that I forgot has hybrid sleep enabled. (I normally use regular sleep to avoid excessive writes to my SSD, and my APC XS1500 UPS will wake the computer to hibernate it if necessary, so it's just as safe.) I found the first hybrid sleep worked fine, but a second attempt done immediately after resuming would result in a black screen and an unresponsive, non-sleeping computer, that could only be brought back by a reset. When it came back (and not by resuming from hibernation, just a full reboot), the network was dead, and I had to restart again to get it back. Strangely, powering down instead of resetting it the first time kept the network alive. Explictly hibernating worked fine; it was just hybrid sleep that was borked. So now I'm really concerned that Samsung Magician has screwed up my rock-solid machine in myriad ways. (Why do I care? I hate mysterious problems on principle, and I use hybrid sleep on my other PC that the UPS cannot shut down, as it only supports shutting down the PC connected to it with USB.)
Fourth aggravation - intel.com
I went to intel.com to see if there was an update to the 12.5 RST driver I was using and found a recent 12.9 update under the 7x64 filter, and its readme had a few blurbs about sleep issues being fixed. It errored out at the end, so I went back to intel.com and saw this package was for their NUC motherboards, and the current driver for me was the one I was already using. Thanks, Intel. If your website wasn't haphazard enough, now you're sticking stuff I can't use in the place I've always looked. Now I'm getting really upset, and to make matters worse, I got a delayed "Reboot your computer" prompt. So I looked in Device Manager and found the failed installer had installed the driver anyway. I rolled back the driver and ended up with the standard Microsoft AHCI driver, and then I rebooted.
Resolution - Thanks, Microsoft (non-sarcastic, this time)
It turns out the standard Microsoft driver can hybrid sleep multiple times in a row just fine. It also seems to come out of regular sleep faster that Intel RST, in terms of making the keyboard immediately available. I don't know if Samsung Magician can kill it when the system tries to enter normal sleep, and I'm not planning to find out. I will never deal with Intel RST again unless I have to.
