Hi there,
I am seeking advice from experts on un-installation (respectively system restore with rollback to older driver) after a apparently faulty installation of the latest (Intel® RST) RAID Driver version 13.2.4.1000.
This goes under the category "Never touch a working system"... Unfortunately, I still felt it would be a good idea to update my Intel RST RAID driver from 10.8.0.1003 (which worked well) to the latest version (13.2.4.1000 as of today) and it seems that wasn't a good idea.
Here's the short version (please read on further below if you want more extensive information):
Hardware: DELL "Alienware" Aurora with Intel Corei7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz, 2668 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s), Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 and 12 GB RAM. OS is running from drive C:/ which is a 2TB NTFS hard drive and main data storage on drive G:/ which is a RAID 1 consisting of 2x 3TB hard drive:
Not entirely shure why the above does not show the two 3TB SATA disks as RAID 1. Probably part of the problem lies here...
Here are the details for the disks which are actually part of the RAID 1:
After installation of said driver, I started having all kinds of problems, such as PC not shutting down, RAID 1 apparently synchronizing endlessly, various software freezing probaly due to some problems with file access and Disk Management not displaying any information due to not being able to connect to Virtual Disk Service.
Besides trying to understand what the exact problem is or what caused the mentioned problems, my main question is, can I use an existing system restore point to go back to the previous drvier version, without the risk to loose access to the files on my hard disk or loose any data? The point is that I tried to uninstall the current driver (13.2.4.1000), but it says that this is not possible as it "MAY currently be controlling the hard drive"...
I have not yet explored the option mentioned at the bottom of the window, which suggests reconfiguring the sytem so that it uses the native operating system software to manage the hard drive controlers.
Another option is that I have a system restore point from just before the driver installation (which apparently also installed some SCSI drivers...):
However, as you can see, it does also not promise that this will work without problems. I am simply afraid that trying one of the two options above to get rid of the apparently faulty driver installation will wreak havoc, ultimately leaving me with even more problems. Data on my RAID 1 are way too important to just try (and error) any of these options without consulting first with someone who can give good advice and guide me to do this the safe way...
Thanks in advance for any helpd with this!
I'll send this out for now as this may be sufficient for you experts out there to give me some good advice (hopefully!). In the meantime I'll post the more extensive version in a separate contribution to this discussion (may take a while...).
Cheers for now,
pandufa
PS: Apologies if this is posted in the wrong section. I didnt' find a better one and saw a similar discussion in this section. My plea to admin to move this to where it belongs if necessary.
I've added System Report as TXT file.