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Intel® RST 10.0.1.1008 cause high cpu load / System process to hang on Win7 x64

idata
Employee
2,730 Views

Hi,

after installing RST 10.0.1.1008 on a almost freshly installed Windows 7 x64 the process "System" (NT Kernel & System) is getting high cpu load (50% / 1 of 2 cores) after different amounts of time which causes the System to hang randomly and system unusability. It took me like 10-15 mins just to graciously restart the system (from pressing Start - Restart until the actual restart occured which took another 5 Mins).

I have verified that RST is the fault of this problem, since everything else I installed on this system yesterday (Atheros Lan Drivers and Aida64 Extreme) was uninstalled or reverted back. The problem persisted until I uninstalled the RST drivers.

My System:

Win7 x64 enGB

E8400

Asus P5Q Pro (P45 Chipset)

4x2GB OCZ-DDR2-800

2xSAMSUNG HD322HJ (320GB) as RAID0 as System disk (OS+Games)

2xWDC WD15EARS (1,5TB) as RAID1 as storage disk (only data)

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idata
Employee
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Your problem might be down to having 4K sector disks when you installed windows using the built-in older driver to install with and that you should not attempt to upgrade to RST 9.6 and likely higher unless you used RST 9.6 drivers to load windows with in the first place.

http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/CS-031502.htm http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/CS-031502.htm

Really I can't see why that should be a problem but it looks that way.

No problems here with high cpu load with RST 10.1.0.1008 on win 7 64-bit so far....

idata
Employee
1,276 Views

Okay, didn't gave the 4k sectors a thought, though it shouldn't be a problem since, and I forgot to mention this in my first post, the OS is installed on the RAID0 and the RAID1 with the 4k sector disks is soley for data storage, so no OS related files there.

When this problem happened I was always surfing the net and did nothing on the storage drive, except for maybe the antivirus program doing background crawling. The only thing different in this Windows 7 installation to the other before is that it installed RST 10 instead of 9.6 AFTER the OS installation. I never used the Intel drivers during Windows 7 installation, because it was already recognized by default.

I'm not sure if the RAID information is stored on the drives itself, so I could remove the drives from the system, while the computer is powered down of course, without breaking the RAID. I could then install RST10 again to see if the problem persists with the 4k drives not present. Or maybe just something went wrong during the installation, I don't know.

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idata
Employee
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Or maybe just something went wrong during the installation, I don't know.

Yes that can happen of all things that can go wrong.

Yes you can remove your RAID 1 power on see what happens power down plug it back in and the RAID will find the array.

You could also try removing your DVD drive...someone posted that RST 10 didn't like their drive for booting but may be linked to your high CPU load problem.

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idata
Employee
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Okay I played around a bit with it today and it seems the problem is definitely caused by the 4k drives and I think it happens while the 4k drives are going to sleep or after they went to sleep, because when I hit reset, the BIOS will have to wait for the 4k drives to power up.

I also installed the 9.6 drivers again and with this version / driver the problem does not happen. The problem came back after I uninstalled the 9.6 RST and reinstalled the redownloaded 10.1 RST.

I also dont have the external DVD drive powered on, so no problem from the drive.

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idata
Employee
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Does it happen when you set "turn off hard disk after" to "never" in power options?

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idata
Employee
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No, it doesn't happen, respectively it happens after 1 minute if I set the timer to 1 minute.

So, now that this has been figured out, the question remains why is it happening.

Obviously something has changed from 9.6 to 10.1 that makes 10.1 affected by the drives going to sleep but what causes this? Could be a programming bug in 10.1, could be a bug in the drives firmware or a faulty drive. I only have these two drives, so I can't test if replacing them would help.

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idata
Employee
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Looks like Intel did some major changes again, just because I can't install Intel® RST 10.0.1.1008 at all on my system.

All can I get from running setup is an epic fail:

Faulting application name: iata_cd.exe, version: 12.0.0.49974, time stamp: 0x4474907b

 

Faulting module name: iata_cd.exe, version: 12.0.0.49974, time stamp: 0x4474907b

 

Exception code: 0xc0000005

 

Fault offset: 0x0003ecb3

 

Faulting process id: 0xdc0

I get this error on W7 x64 SP1 (beta1)

No problem with an "old" 10.0.0.1046 version.

What am I doing wrong?

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idata
Employee
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I get this error on W7 x64 SP1 (beta1)

 

 

No problem with an "old" 10.0.0.1046 version.

 

What am I doing wrong?

Your using a beta SP on W7 x64?

Try it on a clean install of W7 x64.

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DSilv11
Valued Contributor III
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idata
Employee
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Im dont have Intel NICs.

Im 100% sure that this is related to the WD 4k Sector Drives because since I disabled turning off the HDDs it has not happened again. If I had set the timer to 1 minute, then the system would hang 1 minute after pressing the apply button, respectively 10 minutes on a 10 minute turn off timer.

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idata
Employee
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Well that could get ugly...the default is 20 minutes in Windows 7...unless this only happens when using 4K sector drives in RAID 1?

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idata
Employee
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AiYoriAoshi is absolutely correct about the cause of the issue. I had an ICH9R controller with RST 10.0.1.1008 that was working fine until I added in a RAID-1 array consisting of two WD 2.0 TB 4K sector drives. I immediately started running into this issue after booting up once the drives were installed.

Thankfully it appears to be fixed, as I updated to version 10.6.0.1002 of the software and haven't encountered the problem again (so far). I had to try a few times to get the update to actually take, as it appears that it will fail if you run the updater while the iaStor.sys process is going haywire. Persistence is the key. Persistence and good timing.

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idata
Employee
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Also see this thread:

/thread/19249?start=15&tstart=0 DH67CL high CPU utilization by System...: Intel Communities

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