I’m back from a great vacation!

And finally decided to upgrade to Vista on my machine.

Then found it’s not as easy as I thought…

After 2 days of struggle I finally figured out the root cause of the problem:

If you have a Dell Dimension 9200 / XPS 410, and got BSOD “worker_thread_returned_at_bad_irql” during setup, or you worked around the setup problem but your Vista pauses for 15 seconds every 5~10 minutes, here is how to fix it:

Open your dell machine case, check where the DVD/Burner are connected. Most likely you will find SATA0 is connected to the only hard disk, and SATA1/2 is connected to DVD/Burner. Disconnect DVD/Burner and reconnect to SATA4/5. Mission accomplished!

It seems Vista’s RAID driver has a hard time to figure out a DVD driver is very different from a hard disk…

This entry was posted on Monday, July 16th, 2007 at 10:21 pm and is filed under Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.