Hard Drive Disappears when computer sleeps

[YggubPH]

Hi all. I loaded my Omen 30L up with hard drives, necessitating that one be plugged into a PCIe-SATA adapter. Unfortunately, when the computer goes to sleep, it disappears, and that can lead to some system instability. Any thoughts on how to rectify? 

[BeemerBiker]

I had this happen to me with USB3 hard drives.  The USB controller used by the driver "Renesas USB 3.0 eXtensible..." did not handle sleep well.  After the computer work up I found I could bring up the device manager and first disable then enable that USB device which caused the hard drive to wake up.  This was awkward and it turned out there is a command line app "devcon64.exe" that I could run to in a batch file and avoid bringing up the device manager.  Devcon64.exe is a utility that is included with the free "personal" version of splashtop but can probably be downloaded elsewhere.  I eventually got a better driver that handled ahci better and the sleep / wakeup problem disappeared.

If the controller your added is "marvel" then look for "marvel" with the device manager and do the disable / enabled trick.  You might also look around for a better driver.  Do not just lookup the board name, examine the chipset and search for a driver from the chip manufacturer.

Good Luck!

[YggubPH]

Thanks for the response, and glad I have the time to address this again. I agree that the driver seems to be key.

The expansion card I got was the BEYIMEI PCIe SATA Card 2 Ports, PCI-E to SATA Expansion Card on Amazon. 4.5 stars and plenty of reviews saying it was plug and play, and people seemingly doing things more complicated than me. What could go wrong? Obviously the power management!

It did come with a driver mini CD, so not long after I posted last Saturday, I figured I ought to try it out.

The CD contains different folders:

• SATA card
• Serial Parallel card
• USB LAN
• USB3.0 Card
• USB1.0 Card

Being the computer whiz I am, I opened the SATA card folder, where I was presented with three options:

• ASMedia
• JMicron
• Marvell

This bewildered me for a bit, but I saw where it said "ASM1061" on the non-descript box it came in, so I went with ASMedia.

This folder presented me with two options:

• ASM1x6xV3.3.3.0000_WHQL
• ASM1x6xV3.3.4.0000

.3 WHQL or .4? I Googled what WHQL meant (I'm a computer whiz and have learned lots on the Google), but decided .4 must be better because 4 is higher than 3 (facepalm). I opened that folder, installed the driver, and all seemed well, so I restarted my computer as instructed.

It immediately went into recovery mode. I tried restarting and couldn't get a logo to come up, so I figured out how to "windows + b" into the BIOS (yay Google and iPhone), and from there I just went straight to system restore and returned to normalcy. 

Naturally, I don't want to go through that again! Should I try my luck with the WHQL driver, as I suppose that is the stable Windows driver? Or am I way off the beaten path?

Thanks!

[BeemerBiker]

You may not be able to automatically wake devices from sleep.  The controller may not support S3 or maybe the disk drive is the problem.

I have asm106x controller for sata.  It comes with a readme file that explains how to install.  Win10 was not on the list but it worked anyway  Your asmedia chipset is probably newer.  Irregardless,  you need to be in AHCI mode.  Your system is new and came with 10 so it is probably enabled in BIOS.  You should check to make sure AHCI (or RAID) is selected AND NOT IDE.

You may want to read the difference between S1 and S3 sleep mode You could try S1 and disable S3 if bios supports that

IMHO the installation from the CD failed probably because it set up the attached disk to boot from instead of booting from the original C drive.  Alternately, the install replaced the motherboard sata drivers with asmedia ones which is also a no-no.

There should be no need to use drivers that came with the CD**.  With everything connected and working do the following

Bring up device manager and look for 'Asmedia 106x SATA Controller' or whatever it calls itself.

Look under 'SCSI/RAID Controllers'. and if not there look under 'IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers'

Go about using your computer.  When it wakes up and the SATA drive is still asleep, find the ASMEDIA device and disable then enable it and see if that wakes up the disk drive.  If it does then post back here and we can try and an auto wakeup.

** There is a better way to install the drivers for the asmedia board.  Look on the CD for the asmedia driver set.  For me, the folder needed was Drivers\VistaLater\x64

At device manager, right click on "Asmedia 106x SATA Controller" and select "update drive" then search and browse to that x64 folder.  This way you install drivers just for the asmedia are not configuring the system to boot the disk attached to it.   I suspect that windows will tell you the best drivers are already installed.

[YggubPH]

That all makes sense. With regards to your test, I can try that tomorrow, but I have been able to bring the drive back by clicking "Scan for hardware changes" in the device manager. Does that tell you the same thing as your specific test would?

[BeemerBiker]

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@YggubPH wrote:

That all makes sense. With regards to your test, I can try that tomorrow, but I have been able to bring the drive back by clicking "Scan for hardware changes" in the device manager. Does that tell you the same thing as your specific test would?

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Yes, exactly.  

Now we know that sub-system can be woken back up there is a tool that can be used.

Download the free app splashtop streamer and install it.  Do not register or activate it.  Look for the following

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Directory of C:\Program Files (x86)\Splashtop\Splashtop Remote\Server\VirtualDriver\utils

09/22/2021 01:47 PM 77,824 devcon.exe
09/22/2021 01:47 PM 81,920 devcon64.exe

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  Create a folder "StartMe"  in your Document or Download folder (cannot be on C drive, needs to be under your account).and copy those files there.  You can uninstall Splashtop now.   

You should read this  article as it pretty much explains everything.

Your system needs to do a "devcon rescan"  when it boots up.  That can be done using Windows 10 Task Scheduler

Configure a task to run when the system start up. something like the following:

Action => Create Task => NAME:"FixMe" + Run whether user is logged on or not + Win10 =>New Action => Start a program + "C:\Documents\StartMe\devcon.exe" + argument  "rescan"

You may need to use devcon64.exe instead of devcon.exe

You will have to experiment with task scheduler.  I am not an expert on its usage and I remember it not working (Permission error) until I moved the devcon app into my own folders.

Good Luck

[YggubPH]

Thanks, when I get a chance to try this, I'll report back.!