Win 10 1607 update on z170 Extreme7+ SOLVED!

Kruge wrote: I built a system based on the z170 Extreme7+ motherboard for a friend last year.  All was fine till last fall when he attempted to update his Windows 10 to the "Anniversary Edition" also known as build 1607.  The 1607 would download, then during install, it would freeze at 26% and then reboot and roll back to the previous edition. Since this was my second ASRock build (I love ASRock motherboards!) I knew there was probably some minor hardware inconsistency that needed to be addressed.  The friend updated all his drivers and flashed his BIOS and made several attempts to update over the intervening months, but to no avail. So, he brought the computer back to me (the Expert, lol) and I logic bombed the problem. First up, since there wasn't a plethora of z170 users with this same problem, I decided it was probably a hardware conflict.  So I pulled the 980 TI GPU card (an MSI) out, I pulled out the wifi PCIe card and I disconnected the two SATA Blu Ray burners he has in there (don't ask me why, it's what he wanted...). Next I did a clean install of the Win10 CD and then once it was installed, I had it use Windows Update to go out and download the 1607 update and it all installed flawlessly, sailing right past the 26% mark that so bedeviled him for months on end.  All was fine!  This proved to me that there wasn't some problem with 1607 update and a bare bones z170 setup. So I then backed up everything and put back his graphics card and wifi card  and reattached the two burners exactly as it was before to try the clean install and update all over again.  As I figured it failed again.  My next task, now knowing it had to be either the GPU, the wifi card or the burners, was to take out one of these at a time and isolate the bad guy causing everything to freeze. I noted that the two BR burners were originally plugged into ASmedia SATA ports and that made me think... perhaps the 1607 install was freezing because it didn't have support for the ASMedia ports?  (Again, he installed drivers from ASRock in all his attempts, so I knew that wasn't a problem)  So this time I left one BR burner unplugged and plugged the other into an intel controlled SATA port.  I then did a clean install again and did the 1607 update again... and it all went through without a problem!  (proving it wasn't the GPU card or the wifi card that were the culprits, too) So, it would seem that the ASMedia SATA ports may be a little finicky with the 1607 update.  If you have updated your z170 Extreme7+ to Windows 10 Anniversary Update (1607) without a hitch, great!  But if you have a problem with it freezing during the install, try unplugging (where possible) any devices attached to the ASMedia SATA ports until the update is completed.  You can reconnect them after without any problems- they will work fine.  Hope this helps! Cheers, Paul

Thanks for your post, it may very well help someone.

Long story short, while the following was fairly common knowledge about four or five years ago, it seems to have fallen off the PC builder's radar. It's also a bit more complex than the one liner statement I'll add next, as I'll discuss below as well.

In general, any of the third party, add-on SATA chipsets like the ASMedia or Marvell, don't work well with ATAPI devices, optical disk drives.

In the past (four or five years ago), another mother board manufacture added a note to their specifications that optical drives should not be used with the Marvell SATA chipset included with some of their boards.

As an owner of a Z170 Extreme7+ board, I applied Windows 10 Anniversary update on it several times, with different drives as the OS drive. Never had a freezing problem during the installations with that or any version of Windows 10. But my ASMedia SATA ports were disabled and unused.

While Kruge's work and results are useful, the question becomes, what caused the freezing during the Windows 10 Anniversary edition update, via a Windows update or clean install?

Simply disconnecting an optical drive from the ASMedia SATA ports, while fixing the freezing problem, does not explain the underlying cause. Or why should the freezing be limited to the Win 10 Anniversary edition? Do we truly know that is the case? If it is, what is so different about the Win 10 Anniversary update?

I would like to know, after the Win 10 Anniversary update, what AHCI driver was installed for the ASMedia chipset? Was it the Windows 10 AHCI driver (now named storahci, although dated the same as msahci from Windows 7), or an ASMedia AHCI driver? The built in generic MSoft AHCI driver will always be installed for any SATA chipset set to AHCI mode, whether Intel, ASMedia, Marvell, AMD, etc.

Checking Device Manager can answer that question. Either in the ATA/ATAPI entry, or under Storage Controllers. The MSoft driver will cause the entry to be in the ATA/ATAPI list, the ASMedia driver will likely be under Storage Controllers, but might also be in the ATA/ATAPI list.

We should also confirm that the ASMedia SATA mode was set to AHCI (default), although IDE is an option.

Unfortunately, we may never know before the Win 10 Anniversary update was applied, which driver or driver version was installed for the ASMedia SATA chipsets (actually two of them on this board.) I know the PC owner installed "drivers from ASRock", which I assume were the ASMedia drivers, but they might only survive during an update installation. The MSoft built in AHCI driver would certainly be installed with a fresh Win 10 installation of any version, unless the F6 driver version was installed during the Win 10 installation, which does not seem to be the case. The Events tab of the Properties for the ASMedia SATA chipset will show the date the device was configured, meaning the date of driver installation.

For all we know, it might be the particular model of optical drive that caused the freezing. Also, the Intel iGPU does not support BluRay disk playback with Windows 10, if that applies at all in this case.

Unfortunately, identifying the true cause of the freezing is more difficult than preventing it, although preventing it was certainly not obvious.

I completely abandon using the ASMedia SATA ports starting with either my ASRock Z77 or Z87 boards, which really coincided with the release of Windows 8 and 8.1. Windows 8 introduced the SSD "Optimize" feature, available in the Properties dialog box of any drive, from the Tools tab.

When Windows 8 (8.1, and 10) recognizes a solid state drive, it will no longer perform a defragment operation on it (worthless for a SSD, and must be disabled in Windows 7 for SSDs), but will instead cause a manual TRIM operation to be run. A nice little feature, it even worked with SSDs in RAID 0 arrays (no doubt thanks to Intel whom pioneered that.)

But I noticed quickly that with any SSD connected to the ASMedia SATA ports, the Windows 8 Optimize/TRIM operation failed. It could not complete, or apparently even start. A little program called trimcheck confirmed my fears... TRIM commands for SSDs were NOT being passed to SSDs connected to the ASMedia SATA ports. That seemed to be AHCI driver independent, both the ASMedia and Microsoftt msahci drivers made no difference regarding passing TRIM data. For me that was a deal breaker, I routinely disabled the ASMedia SATA ports in the UEFI/BIOS.

Recently, I was happy to learn that the ASMedia TRIM bug is no longer a problem, at least on the ASRock Intel 100 series chipset boards. I suspect a firmware fix is the reason, but it might have been simply a driver update as well. I'm not spending time on it to discover why.

wardog wrote: parsec wrote: [While Kruge's work and results are useful, the question becomes, what caused the freezing during the Windows 10 Anniversary edition update, via a Windows update or clean install? Simply disconnecting an optical drive from the ASMedia SATA ports, while fixing the freezing problem, does not explain the underlying cause. Or why should the freezing be limited to the Win 10 Anniversary edition? Do we truly know that is the case? If it is, what is so different about the Win 10 Anniversary update? Parsec, you know I don't use ANY MSoft drivers than I need and have intoned here that my ODDs work just fine on the ASMedia ports. Using ASMedia drivers. Never a problem. Now. I don't do Windows major version upgrades. Instead choosing a bare metal install, with the bare necessities hardware wise installed while doing so. That means no ODD as I prefer to use the USB installation. Could it be an issue with "whatever' ODD driver the pre-OS installs when it enumerates the hardware installed while using a CD/DVD to install?

The only MSoft driver that could be installed for the ASMedia chipset during a Windows installation would be storahci, for Windows 8 - 10. That assumes the SATA mode for the ASMedia chipset is set to AHCI, which is the default in the UEFI/BIOS. If the ASMedia chipset is enabled when Windows is installed, storahci will be installed, even if no drives are connected to it, again in AHCI mode. That can be confirmed in the Device Manager entry, ATA/ATAPI controllers. You then install the ASMedia driver, so the MSoft driver is not used. You might find see that in the Events tab of the ASMedia chipset Properties.

One other thing worth noting, the Z170 Extreme7+ board does not include an ASMedia SATA driver in the download list for any version of Windows. The ASMedia driver we can find in the download list for Z270 boards (2.0.8.0) contains the driver files that can be used during a Windows installation, to load the ASMedia driver, if we chose to do so.

We also have the Disk drives entry in Device Manager, where optical drives will appear. The drivers we find there are all from MSoft, we can't install them ourselves. That would be the ODD driver you mentioned.

What's strange is, the optical drive functions enough to start a Windows installation, but expires at some point during the actual installation. Why does that happen? You offered a possibility, which could be true, but how would we ever know if that is correct? I guess this will become a matter of, just don't use the ASMedia chipset with an optical drive for an OS installation. I vaguely recall reading that in the past, can't prove it.