BSOD intermittent, increasing frequency, Marvell 91xx

[ataraxiaone]

This is a DIY computer build. I have had intermittent BSODs related to this Marvell 91xx controller since completing the build in June 2011. The OS has never needed to be reinstalled. There were times that things went swimmingly along for months. Now, over the last month, I've been getting these BSODs at least once a week. Now more frequently.

I've tried:
1. Updating the Marvell 91xx SATA 6G controller driver
2. Virus Scans with updated defs using MSE
3. All windows service packs and updates are installed
4. Scanning the event viewer -- mv91xx - request to physical disk 1 is timed out; there was also a kernel-PnP driver sissue /driver/WVDFRd failed to load for the device USB...
5. ran CHKDSK on the SSD that is the primary drive
6. misc other dinky tests
7. R & D brought me here.

Thanks for all your help in advance!

 

[Vir Gnarus]

What's the date for the latest driver for your Marvell controller? I see the date June 30 2010 on the timestamp for the driver in the crashdumps but that's still rather old.

All three crashdumps report the driver committing some sort of failure. Two of them result in the driver trapping and trying to call the debugger. It shouldn't happen in normal PC operation. I believe it's usually indicative of hardware failure, or incompatibility. The drive may have sent it a request or response it cannot understand and is trapping on it. This is common with SSD drives with outdated drive controllers or faulty SSD firmware.

You'll want to make sure not only the controller drivers are up to date, but also the BIOS as well as the SSD's firmware. If none of these work, then you'll want to start looking for a replacement motherboard, as the controller itself may just be unable to deal with your SSD drive, or the controller itself is bad and the motherboard must be replaced.

 

[ataraxiaone]

You'll want to make sure not only the controller drivers are up to date, but also the BIOS as well as the SSD's firmware.

Thanks for the help. I went back and was actually able to update to a more current Marvell controller driver. Then when I tried to update my SSD's firmware, I wrongly downgraded the firmware of the Crucial C300 from rev 0006 to 0002. Now my SSD, although it will show as the BIOS loads, and can be seen in the BOOT section of the BIOS, is not recognizable as a drive in Windows. I'd like to continue the upgrade, but Crucial's upgrade software won't recognize it as a drive either.

Gonna try a few more things, but I'd hate to have a $200 brick.

Thanks again for the help though.

 

[Vir Gnarus]

Sorry to hear of it. I personally am aware that SSDs have a high rate of failure compared to HDDs because they're relatively new tech, and the mechanics behind it kinda lends itself to that possibility.

The only other option I can see is to actually reinstall Windows or install a copy of Windows to test and see if a fresh install will recognize it.

 

[ataraxiaone]

I succumbed to reinstalling windows to a different HDD. NO SSD this time What I've done is to try to restore a back up of the original that was made using driveimageXML. I created a single partition, formatted to NTFS, set the partition as active, and restored my image.

The computer returned the "BOOTMGR is missing" error. I tried using my windows 7 CD to repair the system, with no success. I tried the CMD line scripts that I found for manually repairing the drive, and couldn't get them to work. Why is all this so hard?

 

[Vir Gnarus]

It looks like you may have very well bricked the SSD when you inadvertently did the downgrade on the firmware. I'm afraid you may need to replace it. Hopefully you still have warranty on it.

 

[mlg3000]

When I was installing drives, a mixture of 7200s and SSDs, and putting in good SATA cables, I got several Bootmanager can't be found. On my system it turned out that the bios talks to the SATA ports and learns which port (ie, drive), has the bootmanager on it. If you move the drives around and plug them into different SATA ports - even though they're apparently the same, the bios looks at the same port, and can't find the bootmanager drive.

Try using the windows repair drive again and again. Don't let it go round and round after it doesn't find a solution - click next at the first oppty. After several tries, it worked for me and I'm now very careful about where I plug what.

Also. just to be sure, if you have more than one disk, turn on all hidden system files and check each disk to be sure that ONLY One, your actual boot disk, has a boot file and a bootmanager file on it.

Hope this helps

MLG