Changing Sata port for the Win-7 HDD glitchy issue

dcbdbis · 05 Mar 2014

Good afternoon,

I recently needed to reinstall Win -7 Pro x64. I unplugged all my other drives (5 all total) and installed Win-7 with the new HDD connected to the SATA0 port of my MB.

Then post install, I moved the HDD with Win-7 on it to the SATA4 port and then plugged in my other client disks that I support, in Sata3 - 0.

I use my "F12" key to boot from one to the other.

Since I have done this, (and did a fresh install of everything - NO cloning) Skyrim operates glitchy, with frequent NVIdia driver crashes and recoveries while in game. And it is not exclusive to Steam and Skyrim. Windows itself is glitchy, with spurts of speed, followed by what appears to be a "dead" desktop for about 2-3 seconds, followed by everything coming back to life...

The graphical subsystem only hangs/restarts under Skyrim and not under normal system load such as (CAD/CAM). But the glitchiness I'm describing happens regardless of what I am doing in Windows.

When Win-7 was connected to SATA0, I had no such issues.

I am going to assume that installing to this HDD attached to SATA0, then changing the cables to SATA4 has caused Windows to become unhappy.

I have done some tests. As I have good backups, I reversed the role of the HDD's, and the problem follows Windows, not the HDD. The problem seems to be specific to installing while any HDD is connected to SATA0, then post install and post updates, moving the HDD to SATA4 port.

No Overclocking of anything in my MB settings.

Hardware: AMD 8350 CPU
32 GB DDR1600 ram
Win-7 HDD = new W.D. 1TB Black.
NVidia GTX-660
MB = Gigabyte 990XA-UD3
Latest Drivers.

And I cannot install Windows to sata4 with other drives connected. I tried and Windows wiped out my customer's FreeBSD boot partition and the drive numbering that Windows showed in the installation partition selector was all weird. So after recovering my customers boot partition....then I bought this new drive and did my installs of Windows while only one hdd was plugged in at a time.

The issue seems to show up after everything is all done, and the drives are all plugged into where they should be....that Windows begins misbehaving periodically.

I did install the MB's sata and chipset drivers before attempting to install Windows.

Question: Is there a registry setting(s) I need to tweak to settle all this down? If so can someone point me to it please?

Sincerely and respectfully,

Dave

Edit: The drive is at current firmware rev. No update needed.

AddRAM · 05 Mar 2014

How could you possibly install the MB and Chipset drivers before the install ? And why ?

Put the new hard drive on sata port #1, do the install and leave it on port 1.

dcbdbis · 05 Mar 2014

Your first question seems a tad irritated at my original post. I apologize if I upset you.

To answer your questions:

How: If you have hardware that Win-7 doesn't support natively, you have to install boot-time drivers for it, or Windows won't install. Almost every hardware/MB mfg out there gives you CD/DVD media with the drivers you install during the boot process (if needed). Win-7 actually asks for it. I put my drivers on a USB stick and plugin it in when doing the Windows install. It's easier and faster than optical media.

Why: Because without these boot-time drivers Win-7 can't see my HDD's because it doesn't have the proper SATA/AHCI drivers for my chipset on the factory DVD. And without the drivers for the SiiS addon SATA card, it can't see the optical media past the partitioning section of the install.

Now, let me go back to the original issue with an update:

It appears that Windows didn't have the issue with being moved, but BitDefender (my anti-virus) did.

I removed BitDefender and replaced it with MS Security Essentials....and the system appears to be happy now. Perky, no lags, etc. I still occasionally get a graphical system crash every 30 min or so, but that is now limited to Steam/Skyrim. The CAD package (Draftsight) is happy, as is the rest of the OS. So I am writing off the Steam/Skyrim graphic driver crash issue to be specific to Steam/Skyrim. Everyone knows it has issues.....Even with patches in place.

So I am going to re-install BitDefender tonight with Windows remaining in it's SATA4 slot, and see if that clears things up.

FreeBSD is on SATA0 (a 1TB Samsung 840EVO) with the appropriate SSD tweaks, and customer data on a rotating 2-drive UFS2 mirror, with a 4th rotating drive used to store client VM's, also formatted to UFS2.

So Windows is on the fifth drive (also spinning media), SATA4 (counting from 0 as my MB does).

I will post back my results of reinstalling BitDefender Post move, instead of pre-move installation as I did originally.

Sincerely and respectfully,

Dave

dcbdbis · 06 Mar 2014

As promised I am reporting back with the solve.

It was BitDefender. Once I removed it completely, cleaned the registry, rebooted, reinstalled....All is working fine.

Windows is happy. I've spent the last 3 hours putting it under stress and playing Steam/Skyrim. The glitchy issue is solved.

I thank the community for responding.

Sincerely and respectfully,

Dave

AddRAM · 06 Mar 2014

Not upset at all

I`m glad you got it fixed.

dcbdbis · 06 Mar 2014

I occasionally still receive a blue screen where the driver is resetting itself. The other two items that fixed it:

a) Removed the EVGA-Precision-X utility
b) Removed NVidia drivers and all the NVidia accessories.
c) Re-installed the NVidia driver, and performed a "clean" install from the advanced installation menu.
d) Re-installed the EVGA Precision-X utility.

I've been playing for two hours now on Skyrim - no glitches, no blue-screens.

My best guess is that as Windows updated all the .NET runtimes when I performed all the updates,and perhaps the driver and Precision-X didn't appreciate it.

That's just a guess anyway.

Performing the 4 steps above have brought my system's performance back to where it was before I moved it to a different SATA port.

I post this information for other's benefits....

Sincerely and respectfully,

Dave