Windows corrupts after latest patch corrupt primocache Topic is solved

[brighttail]

Welp I have been using the NVMe Driver from Samsung version 2.1.

I found there is a 2.2.0.1703 with a date of march 2017. Going to try these as they are WHQL certified and see if they work.

*EDIT*
Okay so I can confirm the following:
- the Scanning and Repairing is coming from the drive partition that is setup by the L2 Cache. I wasn't getting it until I made a 20GB partition and setup L2 caching using that partition. Restart and BOOM scanning/repairing. I delete the L2 Cache and delete the partition and then remake it as an actual Drive letter, when I restart the scanning/repairing is gone.

So for some reason the latest build does not understand or like the L2 partition. Perhaps it sees it as an error or something. The primary cache on the C: drive works fine.

Also I tried the latest update for my Samsung SM961 M.2 drive. This is one that was released by HP I believe and was designed primarily for the Sm951, SM961, PM951, ect. I installed it and installed the Samsung Magician 4.9.7 with zero problems.. There wasn't any 'digital signature' error. My guess is in the past the NVME driver Samsung put out worked for the SM961 but really wasn't designed for it. This new driver seems to have done the trick. At this point I'm going to continue with the installation process and see if anything goes wrong. I have a full back up of the old build ready if it does.

*UPDATE 2*
The Windows Creator's update from a clean install is working just fine now. I haven't tried my Acronis yet, because I want a few days to make sure there are no issues before I make a clone of this updated system in case I have to go back to the older build. That being said, if I create an L2 cache, every time I reboot i get the "scanning/repairing" message. In the past it would be fine for a few boots then windows would eventually go into 'repair' mode. At this point I'm not willing to test that just yet until I get a clone of this system as it is.

To me it is obvious that the new Windows build is not liking or understanding the L2 cache. I have a Ram Disk going right now with no issues and Samsung Magician is working just fine with the newest drivers from HP.

[Babel17]

Huh, I too was running an L2 cache but ended up ditching it as part of my uninstall of Primocache before reinstalling it. Maybe that was what fixed the "scanning/repairing" issue I was having? Either way, I'm relieved it's gone now.

[BonzaiDuck]

Huh, I too was running an L2 cache but ended up ditching it as part of my uninstall of Primocache before reinstalling it. Maybe that was what fixed the "scanning/repairing" issue I was having? Either way, I'm relieved it's gone now.

[And also answering Brighttail] . . . I think I've been through about three or four routine restarts, and two hibernations just to test that it "goes in" and "comes out." I have no "Diagnosing . . . [GUID] Volume" messages so far. The 960 Pro's caching volume seems to be working . . 91.4% hit-rate, although only a handful of GB's filled so far.

If Romex has a revision team that tests reported problems or tries to replicate them, they may have made a test-bed starting with a clean-install of Windows 10 Build 1703. They may then have installed all the regular hardware drivers and PrimoCache. No telling whether they used Magician, or a 960 Pro drive -- or even a 960 EVO (because I see no reason why it would be different at this point).

The rest of us are trying to mid-wife our varying histories of software installs, disk and desktop organization with our habitual usage patterns into an "Upgraded" Operating System.

Was there anyone among us who was NOT using a Samsung 95x-96x NVMe-M.2 SSD? I'm only tentatively -- tentatively, I say -- confirming that the problem disappeared after repairing/reinstalling both the driver and Magician 5.

The bundled software utility, whether Crucial Executive, Samsung Magician, ADATA SSD Toolbox or Intel's SSD Toolbox, has value for tracking Accumulated TBW on the drive, providing the most reliable secure-erase option for the related make and model, benchmarking and optimization. I have suspicions that different versions of Magician may only work with certain pre-ordained drive models. So that complicates things. If no proprietary software tool or you choose not to use it, there is a share-ware program, something named SSD Tool, which goes a long way for maintaining all sorts of SSD manufactures.

I'm inclined to do the optimization tweaks manually. And in fact, I haven't disabled Prefetch and SuperFetch yet for this 960 Pro -- only the indexing, defragging, and minimum Pagefile size. I observe that unlike Windows 7, Win 10 seems to reduce the pagefile on its own, and has new and lower hiberfil.sys size settings at only 20% minimum and 40% maximum of configured RAM. This makes for a whole new ballgame in the thoughts about swapping in a bigger RAM kit and changing your caching habits.

With my tentative conclusion that my "Diagnosing . . " startup error is gone, I'll report back either way.

[Babel17]

No Samsung SSDs here. I have two Mushkins, a MyDigitalSSD BPX M.2 NVMe, and an ADATA that was partitioned to house a Level 2 cache. Though I do have a Samsung flash drive, but no Samsung software.

Hmm, I wonder if Microsoft updated their OS to accommodate Intel's Optane technology, and that caused an incompatibility with Primocache?

Solve the Most Demanding Memory and Storage Challenges

Delivering an industry-leading combination of low latency, ultra endurance, high QoS, and high throughput, the Intel® Optane™ SSD DC P4800X Series is the most responsive data center SSD.1 Built with the revolutionary new 3D XPoint™ memory media, the SSD DC P4800X is the first product to combine the attributes of memory and storage. This innovative solution is optimized to break through storage bottlenecks by providing a new data tier. It accelerates applications for fast caching and storage, increases scale per server, and reduces transaction costs for latency sensitive workloads. In addition, data centers can now also deploy bigger and more affordable data sets to gain new insights from large memory pools.

High throughput, low latency, high QoS, and ultra endurance: The Intel® Optane™ SSD DC P4800X solves the most challenging memory and storage demands.

Intel® Memory Drive Technology: Usher in New Possibilities with Larger Working Sets

Intel® Memory Drive Technology is optimized for the low latency and high endurance of Intel® Optane™ SSDs, and transparently makes the SSD appear like DRAM to the OS and applications. Together with the Intel® Optane™ SSD DC P4800X, Intel® Memory Drive Technology enables data centers to deliver high-performance DRAM expansion or deliver more affordable memory pools. Intel® Memory Drive Technology requires no change to the OS or applications.

https://www-ssl.intel.com/content/www/u ... eries.html

[brighttail]

I was honestly thinking this because the Optane is available now, tho only for 200 boards using Kaby Lake. That doesn'tl mean that they wouldn't have had to make changes to their OS to accomodate them more.

Pretty much what the optane m.2 does is pretty much what an L2 cache does.

**UPDATE**

I reinstalled Samsung Magician 4.9.7. Recreated the L2 drive of 20gb. I recreated the overprovision portion for that drive as well. Everything is just like it was prior to the Windows Creator's update.

I then created a L2 cache using the 20gb of data and restarted. Windows immediately scans and attempts to repair the cache. After the third restart, I started getting the windows REPAIR issue. By going into Safemode and deleting the partition allowed me to boot into Windows normally but Primocache of course gave me an error, which I corrected by deleting the L2 cache I had created. I tried the exact same steps this time uninstalling Samsung Magician 4.9.7 completely. The results were the same so it isn't some sort of conflict with Samsung's Magician.

So bottom line, for me at least, I cannot create a L2 cache partition using Windows Creator's Build. Any help/suggestion from Tech Support?

[BonzaiDuck]

Same sorts of symptoms; some variation in hardware. Could be more than one cause, loosely inter-related.

On my end, I've been through another handful of restarts and hibernation successes, and there's no sign of any problem now.

In my experience with Primocache, I had run into similar problems if I tried to put two L2 caching volumes on the same physical disk, each for a different OS. I was planning to experiment again with it, but for interim am running only RAM-caching for the W7 OS. Things to watch out for include "off-line writes," when you have a drive cached to SSD or restorable RAM cache under one OS, and -- booting to the other OS -- you write something to the source drive whether it's cached or not in the latter. It would likely generate errors exposed and hopefully corrected with CHKDSK, although the Windows 10 allows scanning of drives without taking them offline or rebooting.

Also, assume you have both system-volume and L2 caching volume on the same boot-drive. You can image the drive excluding the caching volume. Once the image is restored, it will still boot, at which point PrimoCache won't find the L2 volume and the system then simply reads from the source drive. The caching task will still show up in Primo's window, but it will be empty of either a source drive or its SSD-cache.

Maybe you should just give more detail about your hardware. It would help Support if he eventually enters the discussion. And maybe someone else might get an inspiration or a clue.

[BonzaiDuck]

No Samsung SSDs here. I have two Mushkins, a MyDigitalSSD BPX M.2 NVMe, and an ADATA that was partitioned to house a Level 2 cache. Though I do have a Samsung flash drive, but no Samsung software.

Hmm, I wonder if Microsoft updated their OS to accommodate Intel's Optane technology, and that caused an incompatibility with Primocache?

Solve the Most Demanding Memory and Storage Challenges

Delivering an industry-leading combination of low latency, ultra endurance, high QoS, and high throughput, the Intel® Optane™ SSD DC P4800X Series is the most responsive data center SSD.1 Built with the revolutionary new 3D XPoint™ memory media, the SSD DC P4800X is the first product to combine the attributes of memory and storage. This innovative solution is optimized to break through storage bottlenecks by providing a new data tier. It accelerates applications for fast caching and storage, increases scale per server, and reduces transaction costs for latency sensitive workloads. In addition, data centers can now also deploy bigger and more affordable data sets to gain new insights from large memory pools.

High throughput, low latency, high QoS, and ultra endurance: The Intel® Optane™ SSD DC P4800X solves the most challenging memory and storage demands.

Intel® Memory Drive Technology: Usher in New Possibilities with Larger Working Sets

Intel® Memory Drive Technology is optimized for the low latency and high endurance of Intel® Optane™ SSDs, and transparently makes the SSD appear like DRAM to the OS and applications. Together with the Intel® Optane™ SSD DC P4800X, Intel® Memory Drive Technology enables data centers to deliver high-performance DRAM expansion or deliver more affordable memory pools. Intel® Memory Drive Technology requires no change to the OS or applications.

https://www-ssl.intel.com/content/www/u ... eries.html

Which drivers do you use? With that variety, I might be tempted to use the Win 10 native NVMe driver. What happens when you enter Device Manager and "uninstall" the drive -- meaning its driver? You would reboot, and Win should find the device to configure the native driver to it.

Once you get it working that way, see what happens with an L2 caching volume. I suggest that . . . because I'm curious and I don't know . . .

[brighttail]

The problem is, I don't use any M.2 for the L2 Cache drive. I use a Samsung 850 Pro. The drivers for it are provided by Windows and always has been. It is fully up to date on its firmware. I'll provide my system specs below but I would like to point out that when it comes to the L2 cache, nothing hardware wise has changed at all. The only change is the new Windows update.

I did change the drivers of the M.2 after installing the new Creator's build. I use the Samsung SM961s which are OEM drives and not officially supported by Samsung. These M.2s are dolled out to Dell/HP/Lenovo for their laptops and it is up to them to create the drivers. For a very long time there was no driver from these companies and I was using the Samsung 960 EVO/Pro drivers, which worked fine on the Windows Anniversary Build. When I moved over to the Creator's build, this driver was not being recognized valid Digitally Signed, so I went looking and found the new drivers for my M.2 which was released in late March. By installing this new driver, Windows Creator's Build had no signature errors any longer.

My OS is on one M.2 drive. My Games is on another M.2 drive. The L2 Cache partition is on the Samsung 850 Pro SSD and it is caching for the WD HDD. I have only ONE L2 cache. I do have a primary cache for the OS drive. I'm using 8GB for the primary cache and 4gb for the L2. I do not engage delayed writes. I also have a RAM DIsk of 2GB for things like my Firefox Cache. I have tried all this with and without the Ram Disk. CHKDSK offers no errors.

In the end all of this worked with the L2 cache until Windows was updated. It really seems that Microsoft coded the Creator's update to take into consideration Intel's new Optane drive that has just come out, as that pretty much does what Primocache does. For whatever reason Windows does not like or understand what that L2 cache is and tries to repair it every reboot.

MB - Asus Rampage Extreme Edition 10
CPU - I7 5930k
GPU - Gtx 1080ti Founders Edition
RAM - Corsair Dominator Platinum Special Edition 4x8GB
OS/Games drive - 2 x Samsung SM961 256GB
Utility/L2 Cache drive - Samsung 850 Pro 512GB
Storage drive - WD Black 4TB

[Babel17]

Which drivers do you use? With that variety, I might be tempted to use the Win 10 native NVMe driver. What happens when you enter Device Manager and "uninstall" the drive -- meaning its driver? You would reboot, and Win should find the device to configure the native driver to it.

Once you get it working that way, see what happens with an L2 caching volume. I suggest that . . . because I'm curious and I don't know . . .

I've never installed drivers for the SSDs/M.2 NVMe. When I was thinking of buying the M.2 NVMe I read the reviews, and the user comments at Amazon, and the only mention of drivers was from a few users who raised the possibility of hacking in those of another vendor like Samsung or Toshiba. Though I recently found OCZ/Toshiba's NVMe drivers, I never used them. Fwiw, Device Manager says I'm using Windows drivers.

I think that maybe Windows by default doesn't turn off write cache buffer flushing, while vendor drivers do turn it off. Arguably it's risky to turn it off, but it does boost performance on some metrics, though I think most users won't notice the boost. I recently bought an uninterruptible supply, but even with that I think there's a risk of data corruption if Windows crashes.

But I think the pro reviewers do use that setting for M.2 NVMe drives. It was alluded that this kind of drives was meant to have it. I don't know, I just went by this:

The MyDitialSSD BPX series does not require NVMe drivers to work properly on a PC, but you can manually install other brands NVMe drives if you really wanted to do so. We used the default StorNVMe drivers in WIndows 10, but manually disabled the write-cache buffer. The standard Windows NVMe driver in Windows 10 and Windows 8.1 doesn’t pass the Force Unit Access (FUA) command. FUA commands bypass the DRAM cache on the SSD and write directly to the drives cache resulting in really bad performance. Storage review sites that use AS SSD, Anvil and PCMark (Storage 1.0) may show low write performance due to this. You can do registry hacks to disable FUA or simply turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing in Windows Device Manager for the storage drive you want to benchmark. Companies like Intel, Samsung and OCZ have released special NVMe drivers for some of their NVMe drivers to remedy this situation. We’ll show you AS SSD and Anvil scores with Windows Write-Cache Buffer Flushing off.

http://www.legitreviews.com/mydigitalss ... iew_190472

[BonzaiDuck]

With another day's running, I have successful restart -- no errors, successful sleep and hibernate -- no errors. I probably need to test the dual-boot function again -- not because of a menu-malfunction, but to see if switching between 10 and 7 and back again triggers anything new. I thought I'd been through that before, but I'm going to confirm it again.

I think finally this or an overlapping topic came up at AnandTech forums. If fresh installation didn't fix things for you -- including a fresh installation of drivers and proprietary software, I can't think of anything to recommend. The observation about write caching / buffer flushing may be salient to whatever common problem we have that I fixed and others can't. Again -- we have different hardware, and for those with different drives, the "fix" may actually "be there" and "exist," but my solution alone may not get you there.

Also, you could analyze things to death and only lose time while gaining some clarity. But other information that passed my eyes about the Creators Update suggested eliminating all but the boot-system drive during installation -- perhaps just turning off the ports under PCH Storage in BIOS for those drives. There was a strong recommendation to uninstall the graphics driver. If anyone comes up with tweaks implied by Babel17 pertaining to the write-caching and buffer-flushing, please post them, although I think most of us could figure it out from Babel's heads-up.

[RETURNING AFTER THE RESTART AND MENU TESTING . . ] From Win10->restart-> to Win7. Updated the NVidia drivers "Clean Install," then restart->Win10. No problem, no drive-scan/repair message -- nothing to indicate anything other than perfect.

960 Pro Magician "optimization" seems to do everything right, so misgivings in preference to "manual" optimization may be unfounded. As far as I can tell, it leaves Prefetch and SuperFetch enabled.

Also -- I think either Brighttail or Babel17 detailed a Primocache configuration of < 10 GB of SSD allocated. Maybe this was just an experiment for the interim, so the user would be able to see more quickly how soon the cache filled up -- whether it was working etc. But going back to ISRT days with the Z68 chipset, Intel drivers and Intel RST (R . . ST) interface, the practical range for an L2 (SSD-cache) volume was between 32 and 64GB. Primo has given me the chance to experiment with larger sizes, and I've variously set it at either 100 or 150GB. Once you go over 100, you begin to really notice the hit on memory overhead and therefore RAM consumption. If you have more than the usual gaming/home-use/small-office RAM installed, you would notice it a lot less. I'm at an impasse deciding whether to upgrade to 32GB or stay with 16. Usage and usage profile would dictate the choice.

Here's another piece of folklore or "intel" as you might define it as unconfirmed and carrying uncertainty.

I did some research on alternatives to Intel ISRT, Marvell Hyper-Duo, and even Primo-Cache. I think, at most, I only found about three alternatives, one of which only seems to be certified for Windows 7 and its authors state that Win 10 is unsupported -- again, IIRC. I also had indications that every time caching software is successful, somebody like Samsung or Crucial buys the company or the SW publishing rights. There are probably reasons that Primo "won't sell out," and that is actually reassuring. Of course, I might have imagined some of this, but that was the impression I came away with.

Who knows what nexus of difficulty Optane, Intel, Windows and Microsoft are laying at our feet? [Or clobbering us with . . .]