Avoid this pitfall when upgrading to a Solid State Drive

I normally don’t write blog posts about hardware. But this particular problem seemed blog-worthy.

The issue was around my wife’s PC. Her PC is almost 5 years old–it still performs incredibly well. That is one of the benefits of building a custom PC.

Tip: When you build a custom PC it’s not about saving money but getting more bang for your buck. If I were to give a PC manufacturer $1000 versus what I could do with $1000 myself the difference would be night and day. You’d think an economy of scale would kick in somewhere, but it doesn’t. If you can build your own, I recommend it.

With her PC still running Windows 7, it was time for an upgrade. I knew I wanted to take her to Windows 8.1. I figured if I was going to do a full reload, why not upgrade to a solid-state drive at the same time. Kill two birds with one stone. So I did.

The Problem

Everything went well enough at first. The BIOS recognized the new drive. I threw in my Windows 8.1 DVD and the OS installed like a charm.

But then I started to encounter peculiar symptoms. The PC would randomly reboot every few hours.

I checked the Event Logs. Sadly, they were devoid of any real clues. Aside from the Unexpected Shutdown messages, there was nothing else that would lead me in the right direction.

I quickly found no dumps were being created either. This was not good.

I disabled the automatic restart and received the following error the next time it occurred.

CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED

Based on my research it seemed this error is fairly generic. To make matters worse the blue screen never got past 0%.

I searched the web high and low but I couldn’t find an answer. It was time to implement the process of elimination. The only variables were the new hard drive and Windows 8.1.

I checked my hardware first. I swapped the data and power cables going to the hard drive with known good cables. I tried a different port on the motherboard. I upgraded the BIOS. I upgraded the device drivers. Nothing was working.

It was time to go to vendor support. I had purchased a Samsung 850 EVO 500GB drive. Checking Samsung’s website I noticed a free utility called Samsung Magician. I downloaded and installed this utility.

Magician is a fantastic utility. Not only does it allow you to test the drive’s performance or upgrade the firmware, but it also gives you performance tuning recommendations.

When I first launched this utility I noticed that AHCI mode was OFF. I remembered that SATA drives had a number of configurable modes in the BIOS. This seemed like a great place to start.

I rebooted and found my SATA configuration was still in IDE mode. This had worked fine for my spindle drive for years but, IDE was a legacy mode. I was sure this was the root cause of my reboots.

The Solution

Sadly, toggling this setting was not as straightforward as it may sound. I knew as soon as I switched it to AHCI mode Windows 8 would no longer boot.

I tried it anyway. My suspicions were confirmed. Windows 8 went into a reboot loop. I switched it back to IDE and booted back up.

Scouring the web I found this great resource by Imran Hussain.

Imran lists two different fixes on his blog on how to switch to AHCI mode after the fact. His registry fix was the solution that worked for me.

1. Exit all applications.
2. Go to the Start screen and type in Regedit. Press Enter.
3. Navigate to the following registry key:
   

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\storahci\

4. Locate the Error Control entry. Double-click to modify Error Control. Change its value to 0.
   

   

5. Click Ok.
6. Navigate to the following registry key:
   

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\storahci\StartOverride\

7. Locate the 0 entry. Double-click to modify 0. Change its value to 0.
   

   

8. Click Ok.
9. Restart and enable AHCI in your system BIOS.

No more reboots

Once I made that change and toggled the BIOS setting I was able to boot. I checked Magician and confirmed AHCI was active. My wife’s computer has running like a dream ever since!

Credit: http://www.ithinkdiff.com/how-to-enable-ahci-in-windows-8-after-installation/

 How about you? Have you taken the plunge and upgraded to a solid-state drive? Maybe you are considering a hybrid drive? Would love to hear about your experiences.