VIA RAID Tool and SATA Hotswap

Posted on 3 September, 2006 by maximinus

So, I'd been having issues with my desktop computer, which degenerated into a STOP 0xD1 (0x000000D1) error every time I logged in to Windows.
After several hours over the course of a few days completely rearranging the hardware inside my case, including stripping it right back to the basics, I was almost ready to call it quits and order a new motherboard (and graphics card, since there are no comparable boards available any more - Socket 939, AGP, SATA2).  But then I managed (with some very quick fingerwork) to get into Windows Safe Mode (made more difficult by having an old install of Windows on the drive, so I get the menu to choose which install first), and everything was running perfectly fine.
I then disabled the VIA RAID tool, which was set to load on startup (but of course doesn't in Safe Mode), since the bluescreens I was getting seemed to be when the RAID tool loaded.  I restarted into non-Safe Mode, and it worked!  I then shut down, plugged everything back in, and it works perfectly fine once more.

Two good things came out of this all:

• I got SATA hotswap working, which I though was not possible on the VIA chipset (it never used to be possible).  I found a site with an article stating that the latest VIA Hyperion drivers added SATA hotswap support (digg this)
  
• I ended up with a much tidier system unit (since I completely tidied up while I was in there) which uses less power (since I don't have all of my drives in there now, as I can now hotswap so I don't need them all in at once)
  

Update: While it has made it much more likely to boot nicely, it seems that one of the IDE hard drives is still causing problems.  However, in my earlier testing, I did remove this drive - in fact, I tried with just about every other combination and the drive in question unplugged.  So I guess it's both that cause problems - I'll be buying a replacement drive shortly.

**UPDATE**

I've now discovered that while these changes seemed to help in the short term, I was still getting these errors occasionally.  The frequency increased again, and when I changed motherboards, I found that it got so bad that I could hardly log in again.  This time, I discovered the true culprit - an AMD dual core CPU optimiser patch which I had installed when I got the dual core CPU.  I disabled this (it runs at startup) - and have not had a single instance of this issue since doing so.

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