Intel Rapid Storage Technology stopped running

[ardman]

Hi everyone,
Sorry for such a noob question. I have just finished putting together my first build:
Intel i5 3570K on an ASRock z77 extreme4 with 2x8 G.Skill Ares 1866 DDR3 and a Sapphire HD7850 2G. I’ve installed my OS on a Samsung 840 250GB SSD and got a WD Blue 1TB HDD for storage. I plugged my SSD and HDD both into the SATA3 ports on the mb and finished installing all the windows updates and drivers. I ran into 2 problems during my installation of the drivers from the ASRock website: the first was that when I tried to install the “Intel Rapid Start driver”, I get an error message that says that my computer does not meet the minimum requirements. And the second is the common problem that many folks seem to have and that is the Intel Rapid Storage Technology program “stops running”. I’ve done everything that everyone else has done but I still have that problem. Could anyone please help? Thank you so much!

[parsec]

First Intel Rapid Start (which you really do not need IMO, it is just an Intel version of Windows Sleep and Hibernate. Since you have a SSD, this really does not speed things up at all for you, and uses space on the SSD, but it's up to you.)

There is a special sequence of installation and configuration for Rapid Start, that is unusual. You must first install the Rapid Start Utility, not the driver. After some configuration, you install the Rapid Start driver. Here's a link to a guide that explains it in detail:

http://www.asrock.com/support/note/IntelRapidStart.pdf

Next you are referring to the IRST GUI that runs in Windows, from the hidden icon area, or from Control Panel. Or I should say does not run. This is apparently due to a bug in IRST, which there is no fix for at this time, but there is a semi-workaround that is a tradeoff. Don't forget that the actual IRST service is still running in Windows fine, it is just the user interface that won't start, so not a big disaster, IMO.

It turns out that if you have the secondary ASMedia SATA III chipset enabled in the UEFI/BIOS, that causes the IRST Windows GUI to fail. This is also true of boards with the Marvell secondary SATA chipset. The behavior varies a bit depending on the chip and mother board, in some cases the IRST GUI will not fail if the other chipset is enabled but has nothing connected to it, on your board just enabling it causes the IRST GUI to fail.

The workaround is to disable the ASMedia SATA chipset in the UEFI. Sounds weird, but try it. We figured this out in the Intel SSD forum. That was... two releases of IRST ago I believe.

There is one other workaround that I believe will work. Find a version of IRST earlier than 11.5, such as 11.2.0.1006, or 11.0.0.1032. I'm sure you have IRST 11.6.0.1030 or 11.7.0.1013, right?

If you don't use the IRST GUI for anything, you won't miss it much unless you are in RAID mode and have RAID volumes. You could access those from the IRST Option ROM that is available during POST if your SATA mode is set to RAID. Or you can disable the ASMedia chipset in the UEFI, boot the PC, use the IRST GUI, and restart to the UEFI, then re-enable the ASMedia chipset. I said it was a workaround...

[ardman]

thanks!!