Updated Intel SATA AHCI controller driver, very slow and crashes  

Hello.

I was/am trying to solve a BSOD issue and made things worse.
After running memory tests, hard drive diagnostics, sfc /scannow, and not coming up with anything I started to lean towards driver issues.
I used WhoCrashed to analyze my system and it pointed to iastor.sys (intel storage manager driver)
Then I used DriverMax to show me drivers that need to be updated, there were a lot but I started with 2 Intel drivers:

Intel ICH10R SATA AHCI controller
Intel 82801 PCI Bridge -244e

I used DriverMax to download and install the drivers, after updating and restarting my machine it was very slow and it crashes frequently. Takes 5 minutes to boot windows and 30 seconds or more to complete any simple task (clicking on start button, scrolling navigation sliders, opening programs, etc.) and the computer crashes before I can do anything besides open a program. It did have a message that said driver failed to install. I opened DriverMax to rollback the drivers but it crashes while doing so.

I can start it in safemode and the computer is still extremely slow but does not crash. I went to do a system restore to the point before I updated the driver and 7 or 8 hours later is was still on the logging out of windows screen. I restarted and tried again to an even earlier point and the same thing happened again. I then restarted and opened safe mode w/command prompt and ran sfc /scannow and here it is 12 hours later with only 14% of the verification phase done. It's not frozen just moving very slow.

So what are my options here? Is there any other way roll back the driver or do a system restore that I am missing? I suspect it shouldn't take this long to run these tests as I've run them in the past when everything was working properly, but is it possible that system restore was actually running for 7-8 hours and I should have just let it keep going? should I let sfc /scannow keep going? at this rate it will take days.

Is there anything else I can do?

Any suggestion would be much appreciated.
Thank you

By the way it is a Dell XPS 435t/900 running windows 7 home premium 64bit - 8gb ram - 220gb hdd

Yes indeed, lesson learned, thanks.

It was in safe mode when I did the system restore

cdc said:

Yes indeed, lesson learned, thanks.

It was in safe mode when I did the system restore

so u'r system restored sucessfullly ?

No. I boot into safe mode and opened system restore then picked a restore point before the drivers were updated. During the restore process it went to restart and got to the logging out of windows screen and was stuck on that for 8 hours at which point I restarted the computer.

So system restore either froze or was taking longer than 8 hours to complete.

u have only option to re-install windows & never use any third party software..Good Luck :)

Thanks for your input, Mysterious.

Maybe someone else can chime in here?

cdc said:

Thanks for your input, Mysterious.

Maybe someone else can chime in here?

okay

I was able to solve this conundrum by finding the ICH10R driver in device manager under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers and rolling it back. Took 30-45 minutes to complete as the computer was so slow. I suppose I should have done this first as opposed to running system restore or sfc /scannow.

Before I rolled it back next to the ICH10R driver was ATA channels 0-5. I saw a message after the initial driver update that stated some of the ATA channel driver did not install successfully. After rolling back the ICH10R driver and restarting, computer is back to normal and I dont see any ATA channel drivers in the device manager any more.

I do not trust DriverMax to install the correct drivers.

cdc said:

I do not trust DriverMax to install the correct drivers.

You shouldn't. You need to do the research and install drivers yourself. Don't even trust Windows Update to install third party drivers.

It is also best not to depend on Windows System restore, but rather on a system backup. It takes me 7 minutes to make a Macrium full backup of my system and 15 minutes to restore. Saves a lot of time and grief when cr*p like this happens.

Glad to hear you got it straightened out.