T61 laptop constantly crashes with Intel controller drivers

[bradhs]

Here is what I know so far.

When I install any version of the Intel AHCI controller drivers my laptop will eventually crash after about 10 to 45 minutes. The harddrive becomes inaccessible and Vista eventually locks up.

It has nothing to do with Intel Turbo Memory, I have already ruled that out.

I've tried many different combination of drivers and enabling/disabling various things on the laptop.

I know that if I use the standard AHCI 1.0 Serial ATA Controller drivers that come with Microsoft Vista everything works fine. A quick way of crashing my laptop is to run a defrag with the Intel drivers loaded. Once it starts the defrag process within 5 minutes no more disk activity and goodbye Vista.


Modifications from factory: Seagate Momentus 320GB 7200.3 Hard Drive. I even set the jumper pin setting to force SATA 150.


I had this problem with my Hitachi 7K200 drive but only on boot up, sometimes I would have to kill the boot process because it would hang at the Windows Vista start up progress bar. Rarely would this type of issue happen, but it would.

Anyone experience something like this?

Thanks,
Bradley

[bakery2k]

Have you managed to find a fix for this issue?

I too recently installed a 320GB 7200.3 hard drive into a T61 and experienced lock-ups due to the drive becoming inaccessible.

In my case, however, I also received blue screen crashes referencing iaNvStor.sys, the Turbo Memory driver. So, I physically removed Turbo Memory from the laptop and the inaccessibility issues and blue screens stopped.

Are you sure that Turbo Memory is not at fault in your case? How did you "rule it out"?

[jdhurst]

I have the Intel AHCI driver on my T61p with the Hitachi 200Gb 7200-rpm drive and do not experience any blue screens of any kind. I do not have turbo memory on this box. ... JDH

[bradhs]

I had ThinkPad support send me a replacement Turbo Memory module. I've ended up switching to Server 2008 x64 where I've had zero issues. It doesn't support Turbo Memory, but at least my computer doesn't crash anymore. Also, make sure you hard drive is okay, part of the crashing I was having under Vista was because my drive was faulty. I didnt realize it until I ran a the tests using the PC Doctor ISO image that Lenovo provides. Here is the link: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... 56222.html

Are you sure that Turbo Memory is not at fault in your case? How did you "rule it out"?

[bakery2k]

Thanks for the pointer to the hard drive diagnostic CD - the tests on it, along with others I have run, cannot find any problems with my drive.

ThinkPad support sent you a replacement Turbo Memory module and you still experienced the crashes? That does rule out a fault with your particular Turbo Memory board.

However, there could still be a general incompatibility with the T61 + Seagate 7200.3 + Intel Turbo Memory combination. Two of us seeing the same problem, with two separate hard disk units and three Turbo Memory modules, does imply that that is possible - especially as we both saw the issue disappear as soon as Turbo Memory was taken out of the equation.

Is anyone using a T61 with a Seagate 7200.3 hard disk and Turbo Memory without experiencing any issues?

[bill bolton]

saw the issue disappear as soon as Turbo Memory was taken out of the equation.

Turbo Memory does nothing much useful, so if that's the problem, why not just take it out!?!

Cheers,

Bill B.