Reset to RaidPort1 Causing Crash/Freeze?(Esata?)

[endoftheline2]

I've been running windows 7 ultimate since the retail version came out, and I've almost never had a freeze or specific crash that I can remember. About a week ago I had a random total windows freeze while I was in gmail and I had to a a hard reboot.

Then tonight I was playing a .avi video file (just dvd resolution not even HD) on my LCDTV (that I have connected via HDMI to my PC) like I have been for like 6 months, and my PC randomly rebooted after it was playing for 10 minutes. And then about every 10 minutes after that initial crash the movie would freeze with the sound looping. About 3 of the 5 times of this happening, I could unmaximize the video and close it and reopen it no problem after like 30 seconds of it being frozen, but the other 2 times the PC seemed to totally freeze up, and needed to be rebooted.

After all this happened I checked the windows system logs, and I saw a warning about every 3 minutes from the source NVSTOR saying, "Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort1 was issued".

http://img820.imageshack.us/img820/2332/nvstoreventlog.jpg

Event log had about 50 occurrences of this from like 12:30am to 1:50am which was the time frame all the freezing was occurring in. Whats really weird is I then went back into the event log to get a screen shot like a few hours later (and write this post), and most of the time entries are somehow missing from around that time, even thought I clearly saw them just a few hours ago, and now there is only 1 instance of the nvstor Warning, maybe event log combined all 50 or so into this one or something.

At anyrate I am wondering if this RaidPort1 is one of the ports on my PCI-E Esata Card which does support raid. I did have a esata HD connected to one of the ports during all of this (although the Esata HD's power was physically switched off the entire time, the esata cable was physically connected)

I am really trying to get to the bottom of this and figure out what the heck is happening here, because I've played like 100's of movies in 1080p all the time with no problems, and now seemly out of no where I'm getting freezeing/crashing that is maybe related to a SATA drive? it doesn't make much sense to me. Please let me know if anyone has any ideas on this, or has ideas I can use to troubleshoot check things on this.

>Update
So while I was finishing editing this post windows just completely froze again.
I rebooted using regular reset button on my CPU.

Then it hanged at this first bios screen
> http://img810.imageshack.us/img810/8798/1stbios.jpg
for about 1 minute before loading the second screen, then it hanged at this 2nd bios screen
> http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/7646/2ndbios.jpg
with Boot from CD: at the bottom for more than 4 minutes, and I then held in the power button to fully turn it off. (No optical media had been in the optical drive for weeks)

Then it booted up fine, and I checked the windows system logs and they only just a critical error from like a minute ago saying that the previous shutdown was not improper. The esata was unplugged this whole time, and I dont see the nvstor in the event log so now I am really not sure what is going on.

 

[TimStitt]

Hi endoftheline2 and welcome,

Some thoughts:
- Have there been any changes to the system such as driver updates, RAID/IDE/SATA software installs, or any configuration changes to these?
- Do you have the latest drivers installed for your RAID, GRAPHICS and CHIPSET from the manufacturer websites, not from Microsoft update?
- Is the PC overheating?
- Is the CPU or RAM overclocked?
- If you only use the card for SATA and don't use it in a RAID, then see if you can turn off RAID in the settings (e.g. put it into IDE mode) and/or uninstall or disable the RAID portion while still using the card for SATA. I reason that this has something to do with the card thinking that it is in RAID and there is more than one drive plugged into the card.
- Disable AHCI if it is an option for the card as well.

-Timo

 

[endoftheline2]

Hi endoftheline2 and welcome,

Some thoughts:
- Have there been any changes to the system such as driver updates, RAID/IDE/SATA software installs, or any configuration changes to these?
- Do you have the latest drivers installed for your RAID, GRAPHICS and CHIPSET from the manufacturer websites, not from Microsoft update?
- Is the PC overheating?
- Is the CPU or RAM overclocked?
- If you only use the card for SATA and don't use it in a RAID, then see if you can turn off RAID in the settings (e.g. put it into IDE mode) and/or uninstall or disable the RAID portion while still using the card for SATA. I reason that this has something to do with the card thinking that it is in RAID and there is more than one drive plugged into the card.
- Disable AHCI if it is an option for the card as well.

-Timo

>Well I have had a PCI-E 2 port Esata card(capable of Raid for its connected drives, but I have never used it) connected to my system for about 6 months. I have been using it with a single esata drive at a time, leaving the cable plugged in, but the esata HD turned off most of the time when I am not using it. No recent changes there.

>I do not think overheating is the issue, but I will test

>Nothing is overclocked

>I will check the drivers updates and post check, that is a good point

>I will check on disable raid on the card and also this AHCI thing.

Thanks for the ideas I will try them out and see what happens.

 

[TimStitt]

Hi endoftheline2 and welcome,

Some thoughts:
- Have there been any changes to the system such as driver updates, RAID/IDE/SATA software installs, or any configuration changes to these?
- Do you have the latest drivers installed for your RAID, GRAPHICS and CHIPSET from the manufacturer websites, not from Microsoft update?
- Is the PC overheating?
- Is the CPU or RAM overclocked?
- If you only use the card for SATA and don't use it in a RAID, then see if you can turn off RAID in the settings (e.g. put it into IDE mode) and/or uninstall or disable the RAID portion while still using the card for SATA. I reason that this has something to do with the card thinking that it is in RAID and there is more than one drive plugged into the card.
- Disable AHCI if it is an option for the card as well.

-Timo

>Well I have had a PCI-E 2 port Esata card(capable of Raid for its connected drives, but I have never used it) connected to my system for about 6 months. I have been using it with a single esata drive at a time, leaving the cable plugged in, but the esata HD turned off most of the time when I am not using it. No recent changes there.

>I do not think overheating is the issue, but I will test

>Nothing is overclocked

>I will check the drivers updates and post check, that is a good point

>I will check on disable raid on the card and also this AHCI thing.

Thanks for the ideas I will try them out and see what happens.

You're welcome. Let me know if you are successful in resolving your issue, if not, then we'll try something else.

 

[endoftheline2]

Ok, the freezing problem still exists, and it looks like it is directly caused by Nvstor issuing a reset to the raid device. The freeze just happened like 6 times in the past 20 minutes, and every time it happened there was a entry in the event log from nvstor issuing the reset to the raid device. Basically windows completely freezes for about 45 seconds, then unfreezes and everything seems normal.

http://img18.imageshack.us/img18/3690/nvstormasseventlog.jpg

This is the PCI-E Esata card that I do have installed that does have raid:
IOGEAR - GICe702S3R5W6 - RAID5 eSATA 3Gbps External 2-port PCI-Express Card

I am now going to try what you said and see if I can disable the raid part of the card. I'm also wondering if there is a way to determine where this nvstor command is coming from, but it does seem like it maybe from my add in card

 

[endoftheline2]

I have checked my drivers, both my esata card and my motherboard only have vista x64 drivers avaliable because they are a bit older, and the esata card's latest vista x64 drivers are from January 2008 and are the ones I am currently using, and the motherboards latest are also vista x6 and are from September 2008, which are the same ones that I used when I installed win7x64 in October 2009.

I did update the video card drivers for my GTX 260 to the latest. I don't know if that will have any effect but I will see.

I checked in my bios, and the onboard motherboard Raid is disabled, and the settings during the boot for the esata card say no device detected, utility disabled because I do not have any drivers plugged into the esata card.

I think the problem will probably come back, as I have just updated my video drivers and that will probably not address it. Please let me know if you have any other ideas.

 

[TimStitt]

Sorry for the delay I was away today, I had to make a quick trip the country next door.

I've been thinking about this though....
1. Please take a look at your power settings. I'm wondering if the issue is caused because Win7 is trying to put the drive to sleep/standby or something. Your screen prints also show that there is both a RAID and ACPI controller present.
2. Check your BIOS and ensure that PLUG AND PLAY is enabled. We don't want windows controlling this and sending stop-starts to any devices (if we can hep it).
4. Uninstall all Sata and RAID controllers. Run Windows Update. - Where the Manufacturer drivers fail, windows update may help us (although this should always be choice 2); Run windows update and look for Nvidia HARDWARE updates under the optional updates.
5. Try the Generic MS drivers these are called “standard dual channel PCI IDE Controller”. These should already be on your system, you'll just have to open device manager and search for them manually.
6. This thread seems to suggest that it's an issue with the later drivers. Try to find build 7000.
7. This thread suggests uninstalling the RAID drivers (which I think I already mentioned; but check anyway).

From Control Panel enter power options, edit your power plan, select change advanced power settings, extend the turn hard disk off to 999. You can adjust this later as needed; but lets make it high for testing.

Also in Event viewer, order by event and look for any other 129 events, if you can find anything different under the same number it might be a clue. Also order by time and read the events just prior to the first Reset (even the successful ones and look for clues here).

Let me know how you go.

 

[TimStitt]

and something else. I looked at the card specs that you posted and it's using a silicon image 3121 Chipset. Try the latest Windows 7 drivers for this chipset (released this year), rather that the Nvidia drivers.

Silicon Image - Support | Search Results

 

[endoftheline2]

1) I have changed the hard driver power settings to power off after 999 minutes.

2) I have looked in my bios and I do not see plug and play as an option anywhere, do you know what It might be under in the bios?
I see ACPI function is [Enabled]
and SCPI Suspend Type is [S1&S3]
(not sure if these are related at all)


4) look at this screenshot of my device manager:
http://img824.imageshack.us/img824/5654/uninstallcontrollers.jpg

should I uninstall all 5 things under Storage Controllers? Then after that do I just restart and go in windows update as you described? Also my windows drive is connected via esata, will it still work after removing all 5 of the storage controller drivers?

5) I see the "standard dual channel PCI IDE controller" is listed under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers in my device manager (see screenshot), it seems to be installed, how do try it or what should I do with it?

6) I think in that thread they are referring to build 7000 of windows 7 which was a earlier beta build. I don't think theres any going back to that build, the live windows 7 is build 7600+ something. That guy had installed 15.35 nforce drivers, however the newest drivers from nvidia for my nforce4 motherboard that I think I have installed are 15.23 for vista x64.

7) in this thread the guy said he had a raid driver listed under his IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers. In my device manager (see that screenshot) there is no raid listed, the only raid listed seems to be the silicon image controller under storage controllers, which was installed from my esata card.

In your link to the silicon image website I see these drivers:
"* SiI 3132 64-bit Windows BASE Driver for Windows 7"
They are to access non raid hard disk drives which should be right for me. So if I am to uninstall at 5 things under storage controllers should I try these drivers if windows update does not automatically find drivers for my esata card?

Also in terms of the event log I do see 2 entries that are #129 and are different, they are from 11-15-09, 11-16-09, which was very shortly after I installed this version of windows 7 x64 ultimate. Both of these entires from november are a "Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort0, was issued."
This is different from every other recent nvstor that has occurred recently which is a reset to RaidPort1 as you have seen in the screen shots.

Also I looks like I installed the iogear esata PCI-E card back in August of 2009, and I would have originally installed it on windows 7 Beta, before I switched to the full retail of win7.

Update>> Also here is a screenshot of my eventlog right before the most recent nvstor errors started occurring and freezing my system very early this morning.

http://img811.imageshack.us/img811/2630/taskmanagerlogs.png

most application experience starting and stopping, not sure if that could be important

 

[endoftheline2]

I seem to have just found much newer drivers for my motherboard, seems I was looking in the wrong place before. These 15.53 drivers from 3-15-10, I think I will try installing these first and see if the problem occurs, and then I will see what you think about how I should uninstall those nvidia controllers in the device manager.

EDIT:
I just talked to a technical support guy from nvidia, apparently they have a live chat. I told him about my issue and he recommended that I actually try installing slightly older 15.35 drivers, although still newer than the 15.23 that I am likely using now. I just installed 15.35 and will keep using those I guess and see if the issues comes back.l

 

[TimStitt]

Hopefully the older drivers will work, this is also what one of the threads I linked to mentioned.

If all works well (and I hope it does), remember to change your Hard Drive power settings back to 10 minutes or what ever your default was. If it fails after this then at least you know this is a fix; but I'd leave it for now.

Lets go through your questions - but refer to this only of the current two plans (older drivers from Nvida and the power settings) don't work. Then please test them one at a time.

4) Removal of active devices in device manager - Be careful that you don't remove your Operating system drive. I should have clarified this! The OS drive is not on the RAID card is it? If not, I would just remove the Soft RAID controller entry.

5) You would Right click on the above mentioned Soft Raid device and then install the PCI IDE controller drivers on it. This driver is a generic controller and may just work for your card. If it doesn't roll back to the previous drivers.
6)hahaha...whoops. Yes, you are correct (it all seems clearer the next day *grin*). The same logic applies though with earlier drivers for your card.

7) I find that when the card is a dual RAID/SATA card then it is refereed to as either or both by many users. However the users with a true RAID setup usually state it specifically. What I tried to find was solutions for a variety of problems on your card, this was in an effort to see if those solutions might be applied to this issue. From a little research, this problem is happening to many people and the solutions vary just as much. Sometimes with driver issues it's a matter TRY, TICK/CROSS, move on to the next solution if required.

SiI 3132 64-bit drivers: - Just download them and extract if they are compressed in a zip file. Then right click on your Soft RAID controller entry and update to these drivers from the location that you extracted them to (if you need detailed steps then let me know, i'm happy to post them).

Screen shot of event log: - Only one thing looks suspect to me. Just check and see if the application experience service always stops a few seconds before the freezes. If so, temporarily disable it and see if the problem continues. This service should be running as it checks a database to see if programs are compatible; but there is no harm in turning it off for testing to see if it is related to your freezing issue. Windows will run a-ok (maybe even a little faster) with it turned off, but program compatibility checking will be disabled. To disable it, open services.msc and right click on the Application Experience Service. If the issue appears resolved, then we can look deeper into why this is causing it and we may need to start checking all programs that access the drives in question to ensure that they are windows 7 compatible and if not, set them to compatibility mode.

I think that's it - I'll await your two pending tests, before we move on and look at the other stuff.
1. New (I mean older) drivers from NVIDIA
2. Power setting changes

Good luck!

 

[endoftheline2]

Thanks again for helping me out with all this.

Let me tell you what just occurred in a semi time line as I have now sort of been recording it

6-14-10
7:45pm - Installed 15.35 nforce drivers that Nvidia tech guy recommended.

7:50pm - Network access of my motherboard built in NIC (which was just updated by the new 15.35's) cuts out a few times for around 15 seconds from 10 minutes from 7:50-8:00

8:00pm - Network access stops cutting out, everything seems fine for next 5 Hours

6-15-10
1:50am - Network access again cuts out, this time it does not come back after about 3 minutes. I check event log and see nothing specific to indicate what happened, no freezes and no nvstor issues or anything out of the ordinary.

1:55am - I rollback only the NIC driver to the previous version that I was using before, and instantly network and internet access is restored

2:56am - Total 2 minute PC Freeze

2:58am – unfreezes for about 30 seconds, Nvidia error message shows as status in bottom right: “Nvidia Display Adapter 1.97.45 stopped responding and has now recovered” (Not Exact wording)

2:59am freezes again for a minute or so, continues to unfreeze for ~30 seconds every minute or so until totally locks up and I force a restart at 3:04am



Now I check the event log and see what really occurred, or at least what the event log recorded under Windows Logs>System

http://img529.imageshack.us/img529/5894/newnvstor64cdromdevicer.jpg

Event log shows nvstor64 (instead of just nvstor) causing a single “Reset to RaidPort1” exactly when first 2:56am freeze occurred.


Also 5 driver controller errors on \Device\CdRom0 1 second after the nvstor64 error and separated by 1 second

>>>>>>

Ok so basically I tested These 4 things all at once:
1)Setting the hard drive power save to 999
2) Updating Nvidia Display Drivers to Latest
3) Updating Nvidia Motherboard Drivers to 15.35 (not Latest)
4) But Then I rolled back the Ethernet driver to my previous one (maybe this doesn't even effect all this, not sure yet)

And I got 1x Nvidia Display Adapter error crash, and a slightly different nvstor64 device reset, and also a cdrom device controller error essentially all at the same time

I feel like Nvidia is overloading on me now heh.

I looked at the Application Experience Service idea, and it doesn't look like a connection, with the service starting 13 minutes before the older nvstor crash, and then with it stopping 6 minutes before the most recent nvstor64/cdrom/display adapter crash.
It does seem to be starting/stopping around the freeze times, but not really sure if thats a link per say. If theres a 3rd batch of freezes that may help narrow it down more.

I still have not tried using the actual latest Nvidia drivers for anything but my Graphics card at this point, so I am thinking that should be my next test, maybe all the nvidia issues maybe solved by having all the latest Motherboard drivers(thats the usual theory I think heh)

I'm thinking I should probably do the newest drivers test before I start messing specifically with the Raid/sata card. At this point with these other new errors occuring I'm thinking maybe it is not specifically the raid/sata card at all.

I just changed the hard drive sleep back to sleep after 40 minutes since it doesn't look like that is related. But I probably won't make any other test changes just yet tho, I will try to wait to hear what you think my next test should be, and I will also talk to the nvidia guys again tomarow, and see if they have any other ideas as well.

 

[TimStitt]

Wow, this is like a ripple in a pond.

Agreed on the drivers, lets load up the new ones that you have and also please double check all of your drivers from the manufacturers website (not MSupdate). It's really important to have the latest as they 'should' fix any compatibility bugs. Reboot between each one just to be sure. Stay away from the ethernet driver for now (keep the current 'safe' one), lets cross our fingers and hope that it is a separate issue. Also once all other drivers are installed, we can retry the drier recommended by nvidia tech (we need to rule out if it was incompatible with another pre-update driver)

What also concerns me is the Kernel power error, was there a blue screen of death? Are there any other Kernel errors?
If so please upload the memory dump file from here %SystemRoot%\MEMORY.DMP

Clear your page file virtual memory at shutdown. This is just to ensure that all temporary information that windows is accessing is the latest and not corrupt. You can change this back after you reboot.

Here's a summary to update us
1. Update all drivers (except ethernet) including the sata driver
2. Investigate the Kernel error.
3. Set pagefile to clear at shutdown
4. Run SFC /SCANNOW to ensure that all windows drivers are correct
5. Run Windows update
6. If you have another PCI-e slot move the card to that to force it to reinstall.


Let's see where we are at after this and also talk to the NVIDIA tech's at the earliest opportunity.

Just an after thought, but open up task manager (right click on the task bar) or the windows resource monitor (resmon.exe) if you are familiar with it and monitor if any other program peaks (CPU or RAM) when the freezes occur.

If all else fails:
- We may look at the windows performance monitor to set up data collection sets, this might give us more information.
- We will verify of the drivers are correct by looking up the driver properties in device manager and cross referencing the Hardware ID's with an online database.

 

[endoftheline2]

Currently I am using:
>Newest Nvidia Display Drivers [257.21]
>Newest Nvidia nForce Chipset Drivers including Ethernet Drivers [15.53]
>Same Iogear Silicon image Esata Raid PCI-E Card driver I have used for months

Currently no specific nvstor issues for 14hours since I updated to these newest drivers.

However after 12 hours of no problems I did plug in my 1TB esata HD (has been unplugged for about 4 days since the issue) into the right esata port, and I tried to run my regular backup using this GFI Backup program, and windows stopped detecting my esata HD after about 1 minute of the backup. Here are the errors:

http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/8207/1tbhdissuesconnectedtor.png

That harddisk3 must be my 1TB external esata drive and it seems essentially the HD just disappeared from my computer and disk management after this controller error and thus the backup failed. However there were no freezes and nothing related to nvstor or issueing resets.

I then plugged it into the other (left) esata port on the card just to test the port real quick. And then I ran the backup and it ran fine for 2 hours backing up 415GB of data over the PCI-E esata card. No errors or anything else during or after that backup.

So its possible I guess that my right sata port just has some issues. I can't say for sure that I ever used that right port, I might have only used the left sata port all this time. Maybe these disk errors are just random and not related to the nvstor issues. At any rate I will only use the left port for a while and hope that it will keep working fine.

At this point I am going to keep using the system with this drivers set until I see some nvstor related errors again, or some other errors that really seem to be related. Right now its still possible these new drivers have fixed the previous nvstor related issues until I see some more errors related to them again.

Also:
>I have run SFC /SCANNOW, it found no issues
>Windows update finds nothing new updates
>I looked at the kernal power errors, they are just caused by me forceing a reboot with the reset or power button when it was frozen from the nvstor issues. I don't think they indicate anything other than. They have never occurred except by me actually forcing the PC to shutdown.

 

[TimStitt]

At this point I am going to keep using the system with this drivers set until I see some nvstor related errors again, or some other errors that really seem to be related. Right now its still possible these new drivers have fixed the previous nvstor related issues until I see some more errors related to them again.

That sounds positive and like a good plan *fingers crossed*.

It's always possible that a port is dying. It at least would explain the intermittent timings of your issue. Give the suspect port the smell test, if it smells like burnt circuitry I'd replace the whole card. Or if you ascertain that it's dead, then replace the whole card. If the port is dead then the rest of the card has the potential to die too and it may fry your hard disk mother board on the way out. For example, I lost 4 drives on a fault power supply that fried all disks connected on one power chain and as an IT manager I've seen faulty ports fry the disk motherboards too. If you have an old sata drive, use it for testing.

Good luck, I'd love to close the lid on this one. At this stage i'm as eager as you to put it to bed.

 

[endoftheline2]

Well I don't smell any burning or anything, I will probalby test out the other port after I test this setup some more, but right now I'm hoping that it should be ok.

Right now about 1 day has passed with the current new drivers working fine, so I'll continue to see what happens with them, and I'll check back. Again, thanks a lot for all your help

 

[TimStitt]

You're welcome. *fingers still crossed*