HWiNFO disables some of my harddrives

[Dennis05]

Hello,

I found a rather unusual problem with HWiNFO64.

I have four harddrives and one SSD in my system

Seagate ST3000VX0000-1CU1 (3 TB)
Hitachi HDS722020ALA330 (2 TB)
Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500 GB
WD WD4003FZEX (WD Black 4 TB)
WD WD40EFRX (WD Red 4 TB)

and during startup HWiNFO disables two of them. The Seagate and the Hitachi disappears from system after HWiNFO has started. They are nowhere to be found and are only back after a full reset via the reset button. The two missing drives are rather old (~5 years), I was planning to replace them next year. The other three drives are new, purchased them in the last six months. All drives are connected to the onboard SATA-slots. They are all controlled by the Z97 chipset and not by an additional SATA-controller. Two of the SATA-ports are shared with a m2-slot on the mainboard, but I have no m2-SSD connected.

I tested different versions of HWinfo (4.65, 5.02, 5.10) and it happens with all of them. With the 5.x versions the drives disappear right during start of HWiNFO. with the 4.65 version the drives disappear after I push the sensors-button.  

I installed the latest intel mainboard drivers for z97 chipsets. 

my systems specs are as follows:

intel core i7 4790k
MSI Z97 Gaming 7
16 GiB G.Skill DDR3-2400
2x Geforce 770 GTX
Windows 8.1

I uploaded a debugfile from version 4.65.

Any insights on this?

regards,

Dennis

 

[Martin]

This is a really strange issue. Can you please upload a DBG file from the latest version ?
Also, you might try to install latest Intel RST drivers to see if that helps.

 

[Dennis05]

Hello Martin,

thanks for your help. I made a new debugfile with v 5.10-2700 and uploaded it to this post.

The harddrives disappear during the "detecting IDE/SATA drives" phase of the HWiNFO startup.

I installed the intel RST software, but it didn´t help.

regards,

Dennis

 

[Martin]

Thanks. I'm afraid it's very difficult to determine which exact step is causing this problem without more extensive debugging.
Disabling the entire Drive Scan in HWiNFO should fix the problem in case you don't need drive information.

 

[Dennis05]

Disabling the drive scan prevents the bug from showing up. 

But it is still a little confusing why it hits this two hard drives and not the newer ones. Is it because they are old (maybe missing features) or are maybe the used SATA-ports on the mainboard the culprit? I´ll play around a bit and try to connect other hard drives to this ports and see what happens.

regards,

Dennis

 

[Martin]

I'm not sure why exactly it happens, but I assume that some of the queries HWiNFO sends to identify drives trigger some actions that result in disabling them. It shouldn't happen and I was expecting that the latest Intel RST drivers will handle this properly..
Please let me know if you find anything more...

 

[Martin]

Just did more analysis and it seem those 2 drives are not handled by Intel RST after installing it - they seem to still use the legacy driver and reside on a different 'bus' than the other drives. So that might explain why installing the RST didn't help, but it doesn't explain why they get disabled. Is it possible that those 2 drives are connected to the ASMedia controller ?

 

[Dennis05]

You are right, they are both connected to the ASMedia controller (asstor64). I confused the numbers of the sata-ports (they are all black) and thought, that the two lower ones would belong to intels Z97 Controller and the upper ones to the ASMedia controller. It is the other way around.

I´ll try to connect the two harddisks to the Z97 controlled ports and my ATAPI-drives to the ASMedia controller. I hope they won´t disappear like the hard disks did.

 

[Martin]

I'm still checking this, would you be willing to run a new Beta build for a test?

 

[Dennis05]

Sure.

 

[Martin]

Please try this: www.hwinfo.com/beta/hw64_511_2702.zip
I'm not sure if this will solve the problem, but in either case please attach a new Debug File created using this version.

 

[Dennis05]

Didn´t solved the problem, but now it takes 15 - 20 seconds before the drives disappear. New debug file is attached.

 

[Martin]

Thanks for your feedback.
Based on the dump I see that my recent changes made some improvement and I was expecting that would solve the problem.
I'm afraid, I don't have more ideas now, so currently the only way to avoid the issue is to disable the Drive Scan.
Another option might be to try to upgrade the ASMedia SATA drivers.

 

[Dennis05]

I installed the newest ASMedia drivers for the controller this evening, release date was 10/2015. Can´t see any improvement with them.

Tomorrow I will try to swap the hard drives with the optical drives. Today it is too late for that - Gute Nacht.

 

[Martin]

I'm heading to bed as well Gute Nacht

 

[Dennis05]

Yesterday I swapped the two hard drives with the optical drives (now all hard drives are on the z97 controller and both optical drives are connected to the ASMedia controller). That solved the problem for me. HWiNFO is no longer complaining and I can use the hard disk detection without the drives disappearing.

Thanks again for your help.

regards,

Dennis

 

[Martin]

Thanks for your feedback, I'm glad you found a solution.