Missing Media Drive Icon After a Cold Boot/Resuming from Standby

Missing Media Drive Icon After a Cold Boot/Resuming from Standby

There has been much speculations on the said issue lately in the Dell Community and suggestions and investigation are compiling up without a definite point-of-failure of a missing HDD after a cold shutdown and/or resuming from standby. So far, the issue affects random types of Dell computers, adding up to its unusual behavior.

The root cause is really hard to figure out but Dell proactively released a fix through an updated firmware from their website. Download the HDD Firmware Update version 7.12, A01 to fix the issue.

How to Enable AHCI and Turbo Cache for DELL Inspiron 1720 with Windows Vista

How to Enable AHCI and Turbo Cache for DELL Inspiron 1720 with Windows Vista

In Dell Inspiron 1720 portable, users may experience lock up or system may go into a BSOD (Windows Blue Screen of Death) during PC Restore, manual Operating System Re-Install or even after a hard drive replacement. The current workaround is to set the SATA Operation (this is in the BIOS accessible by tapping F2 after restart) from AHCI to ATA in the BIOS. However, this usually makes the system run slow as the HDD would act exactly like an IDE HDD. This problem is due to the SATA drivers not being installed. Some users prefer to have AHCI mode back. To resolve this issue, just perform the following steps:

NOTE: Before you even begin, download ALL the latest SATA drivers available for your system (in this case the Dell Inspiron 1720) from the Dell support site. You will definitely need them.

1. First, go to Start (or the Pearl in Windows VISTA), click on Run, and type “regedit”, and then press enter (or you can just type regedit on the Search box upon clicking on the Pearl).

2. In the registry screen, follow this subkey (you will really need to manually click on the plus sign next to the entries and navigate till you reach the exact sub-entry):

|    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci    |

3. In the “Msahci” key, double click on “Start” in the name column.

4. In the “value data” box, change the value to “0”, and then click OK.

5. Close the registry and restart your machine.

6. Upon your reboot, press F2 at the Dell splash screen to enter the BIOS.

7. In the BIOS, change your hard drive setting to AHCI. Save your changes and exit, this time allowing the system to boot into Windows. At this point, you’ll know if your  registry edit worked. If Windows does not boot, simply go back into the BIOS and change your HDD settings back.

8. In Windows, the Automatic Hardware Installation Wizard will install new drivers for AHCI and related things. Pay no attention to this, and DO NOT RESTART when  the wizard prompts you to. Rather, install all of the SATA drivers you obtained for your system from the Dell support site without restarting in between them. For the Inspiron 1720, install R154200.exe (Intel Matrix Storage) and  R154164.exe (Turbo Memory). Once the final driver is installed, you can now restart your machine again.

9.You may now also enable Turbo Cache (Flash Cache Module) mode from the BIOS menu. On this reboot your  system may install one final HDD driver, making you do an additional restart.

This should also work for Inspiron 1520 and all other portables which have ACHI capabilities running on Windows Vista. Just get the SATA drivers from the support site. I have tried this personally on one of my Inspiron 1720s and it absolutely worked just fine. There is another solution found on the link below but it could possibly be for Windows XP systems. However, I can’t really conclude until further tests are conducted. Will keep you posted though! 🙂

http://www.dellcommunity.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=insp_harddrive&message.id=66356&query.id=285657#M66356