Vertex 2 SSD Problems

Khrest

Khrest

Khrest

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Joined
26 Jul 2003
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Loughborough
I bought on of the 60gb Vertex 2's on offer yesterday and have started installing into my Windows 7 system.

I update the bios on my GA-P55-UD5 MB because there were reports on the OCZ forums about issues with SMART reporting on Gigabyte boards. So I now have 11c on with all my original overclocked settings back in. Enabled AHCI for eSata in the bios as well.

I added the SSD as a slave drive and Windows 7 detects it during boot up. Its running 1.23 firmware so I felt I should upgrade that as well before going any further.

This is where I am having problems and I cannot upgrade the firmware. First I tried the OCZ tool which downloads the latest firmware on the fly. I get a warning from the firewall and after okaying it I then get a total system freeze about 10s later.

I then tried the more normal updater and downloaded the 1.24 package from OCZ. This appears to complete the process but the drive firmware remains at 1.23 after the reboot. I have tried this three time and on the fourth attempt I had another system freeze.

I am starting to worry that I might have an incompatibility or a faulty drive somewhere, and I havent even got as far as installing an OS on it yet!
 
on the ocz site there are detailed instructions for this, i was reading them the other day. The vertex 2 is a sandforce controller right? which means you can do it through windows iirc. You said you enabled AHCI for esata, when you need to enable it for the internal sata ports, and have raid disabled. Also its apperently recommended to have the ssd in port 1 of the mobo when flashing firmware.

Id go on there support site, and look through some of the guides for doing it, they have screen shots etc and its all step by step and has lots of troubleshooting tips.
 
Whoops, rookie error there. So eSata is external sata then? I need to did out the manual I think and work out which sata option i need to change I think.
 
yea eSATA is external sata. your mobo should have options for sata ports to be ran in IDE-RAID-AHCI or native/something else. it depends on who made the bios tbh. The ocz forums have all the different options listed and what they translate two. Although I cant seem to work out how to get my mobo into IDE mode to update the firmware on my vertex 1 (indilinx controller so has to be through a boot cd and in IDE mode) :(
 
Tried trial and error in the bios and now get the drives detected as AHCI on boot but get a BSOD just after the windows logo appears. Definitely time to slow down and read through the OCZ site.
 
The updates in 1.23 are fine for now... so I would not worry about 1.24 for the time being frankly.

Enable AHCI before you install Win7 to the drive, if you change it after install you'll just get a BSOD/no boot (top setting on the bios page... the one lower down the bios page can stay on IDE for now)
I'm working from my lappy so I'm a bit vague and not able to access the bios screen on my own puter.

Try downloading the OCZ Toolbox from the forum site and using that to update the firmware if you really must.

OCZ's own advise is to switch off ... wait 5 mins... reboot :)

This worked for me :)
 
i think the drive has to be in AHCI mode for the update to be able to be applied. You can enable it in windows after installing it by changing a couple of reg keys (also guides for this on the ocz site) which then means when you reboot and enable it in the bios it shouldnt BSOD. Sorry I didnt mention this earlier, forgot as its been over a year since I encounted that BSOD. Once thats done I assume the updater will work, but ive not done it that way before so I am not sure.

But yea, getting excited about having an SSD fails life. I imaged mine and ended up with a dodgy partition offset so I get strange read/write speeds on certain file sizes lol. although I have now formatted, but for ages I couldnt work out what was up with it.
 
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