Fail to Boot after Intel RST Install - Repair Apparently Impossible

sasquatchgeoff · 04 Sep 2015

Upgraded to Windows 10 from 8.1 a week ago. 120G SSD, Windows image sits on 111 gig partition with a 450mb "recovery" partition showing up (??) in disk management and diskpart. Installed Intel RST drivers today and it has been downhill ever since.

File system looks intact - I now have the drive out and on a usb external. All of my efforts to mend image in situ have been fruitless.

I have tried pretty much every option in the automated recovery environment with no success. Windows will not boot into safe mode in spite of reverting the machine via command line back to legacy boot sequence.

A 128 gig usb flash disk with an O&O backup disk image made two days ago somehow got corrupted and is now unreadable. System restore point not set (for whatever reason I thought it was). This is the third machine in my house that has been upgraded to Windows 10 and the installs have all begun to run together in my mind. This is a perfect storm of boneheaded error on my part. Not a good evening for me so far...

I ran a series of mbr restore commands as specified in this link. Nothing has helped. Recovery environment simply does not see a valid windows installation. When rebooting after hitting F8 for safe mode, I get the light blue "Your PC needs to be repaired” and “Error code: 0xc0000225" screen. So not even a safe mode to reverse those pesky drivers.

I also followed the instructions in this link without getting the system to boot.

After selecting "startup repair" in the recovery environment, the SrtTrail logfile shows "The operating system version is incompatible with Startup Repair" maybe because the only installation disk I have is 8.1? Is there even a 10 startup disk like the old vista and 7 iso's out there?

I suspect windows is not seeing the drive because the RST drivers are preventing the system from seeing the drive even when in the recovery environment. Intel warned me before installing them that they were irreversible. Maybe the solution would be to change some registry values via command line, but I need some help with that if anyone is inclined.

The reason I have avoided a clean re-install is the sheer volume of applications I have, as well as having to wait on windows 10 to do its thing, then download again, etc. I would like to somehow get this drive to boot.

Thanks in advance for any advice or help.

geoff

Snakeyes · 04 Sep 2015

I'm not familiar with your motherboard, but have you tried connecting the hard drive to an alternate Sata (Asmedia if you have it on your motherboard) port. Also, try sitting the bios to IDE or raid. Longshot but worth a try

sasquatchgeoff · 04 Sep 2015

Snakeyes said:

I'm not familiar with your motherboard, but have you tried connecting the hard drive to an alternate Sata (Asmedia if you have it on your motherboard) port. Also, try sitting the bios to IDE or raid. Longshot but worth a try

Thanks Snakeyes,
There is a pair of Gigabyte onboard RAID sata ports not controlled by ICH10. I connected the image drive to one and reset the bios to IDE both on the ICH10 controller and the Gigabyte. No joy.

Another thing I did was download the actual windows 10 iso image with the tool on this page. That made a significant difference in the way that the startup repair behaved. At least it attempted to repair the boot files. But after an exhaustive series of repair attempts, I threw in the towel and reset windows. I am in the process of re-installing my applications as I type this. Again, thanks for your input. - geoff

Snakeyes · 05 Sep 2015

I feel your pain. Been there. Best of luck

DJG · 05 Sep 2015

sasquatchgeoff said:

Upgraded to Windows 10 from 8.1 a week ago. 120G SSD, Windows image sits on 111 gig partition with a 450mb "recovery" partition showing up (??) in disk management and diskpart. Installed Intel RST drivers today and it has been downhill ever since.
.....
.....

Thanks in advance for any advice or help.

geoff

What version RST did you install?

sasquatchgeoff · 05 Sep 2015

DJG said:

What version RST did you install?

14.6.0.1029

I have no beef with the drivers - likely caused by some conflict with the GSATA (Gigabyte) onboard controller drivers installed a couple days ago.

DJG · 05 Sep 2015

That's what I'm running with two RAID arrays on the RST, no problems. What a bummer, man. Hope you get it fixed.

sasquatchgeoff · 05 Sep 2015

DJG said:

That's what I'm running with two RAID arrays on the RST, no problems. What a bummer, man. Hope you get it fixed.

Thanks DJG,
Apparently 10 (as well as 8.1) provide sufficient drivers for ICH10R functionality, I was just trying to get the GUI back because I like keeping tabs on my arrays. Live and learn. It may very well be that this new image would not take issue with RST, but I'm not going to take that chance, at least until I set a restore point and create a backup image on storage media :) - geoff

DJG · 05 Sep 2015

I experienced some problems when selecting RAID writeback cache mode with the previous RST version, but not with this latest one. I also like to use the app to keep tabs (pun intended) on my arrays. I do have to say I can see no appreciable speed difference turning on writeback so far.

sasquatchgeoff · 05 Sep 2015

DJG said:

I experienced some problems when selecting RAID writeback cache mode with the previous RST version, but not with this latest one. I also like to use the app to keep tabs (pun intended) on my arrays. I do have to say I can see no appreciable speed difference turning on writeback so far.

There was a time when SSD's were new and much more expensive than they are now, I would put two or three smaller drives in a RAID '0' to provide enough space for an OS partition. The performance gain was a nice by-product for gaming and write-back cache mode certainly came in handy - this was back in the day before SATA III and OS-native TRIM. As the technology has improved (and gotten cheaper) I do not typically put an OS image on an array, but I do have two old WD 750 gig Caviar black drives that are my main storage, and are in a RAID '0' - they are 6 years old now, and show no sign of decay, but they won't last forever and having what used to be know as Intel Matrix Storage Manager to look at them and analyze them gave me an extra sense of security.