Asrock X79 Extreme9/Windows 7 shows Action Center error for Marvell 91XX controller

[Leude]

I have recently installed Windows 7 on my computer which is configured entirely on ASRock X79 Extreme9 motherboard. Now the system try keep showing me an Action Center message and it looks like an error message:
Address a problem with Marvell 91XX Config ATA device.
The Message Details page telling me that I need to search for a driver for this hard disk controller because it ha stopped working. It does not able to find a compatible driver for Windows 7. I am sure that I have installed the latest Marvell driver which I got from the ASRock site. My system configuration is as follows:

• Windows 7 64bit
• ASRock X79 Extreme9 motherboard
• Intel 3930k 3.2GHz
• G.SKILL 64GB (8 x 8GB) DDR3 1600
• MSI HD7970
• Samsung 512GB 830 Series SSD
• Hitachi 4TB
• SeaSonic Platinum-1000W

[Marquise]

I don’t think that you will need an additional driver if you are going to install Windows 7 on your PC. As far as I know that the Hard disk controller can use Windows generic drivers built into windows 7. In my case I have 9128 and 9182 controllers and they work properly with Windows 7 without the use of Additional driver. In your case you might be having 9220 and the 9170 controller. Make sure that Marvell controller is enabled on BIOS. However if you cannot get it work with Marvell controller port, you can try with normal Intel controller ports.

[Leslie f]

I am also not clear about this thing yet. First I didn’t think that Windows will also need any additional drivers in this case. I would rather try simply switching the mode to AHCI and then install Windows 7 without any additional drivers. This will surely work because when I did the same I got the drive in the partitioning screen and so I assume that it really don’t need anything beside Windows built in drivers. There is a reason where people don’t use Intel ports and that is because of the slow bandwidth. If you use Marvell ports, you will get at least 6 Gbit/s bandwidth. It is a different from Sata II read/write speeds. Anyway, didn’t you get the installation CD with the motherboard? This contains every necessary drivers and you don’t need to look over anywhere else.

[ADELYN]

Regarding your problem, to start Windows from the Marvell controller in AHCI mode need the AHCI Marvell driver. My advice is to skip this and connect the disk controller ports in the chipset. If you search you'll find in this forum that users are dissatisfied with the performance of this controller: in some cases are worse than SATA II, therefore, unnecessary hassle with installing drivers then do not bring the desired results. Somewhere in this forum a user recently complained that with the Marvell controller on a motherboard getting painful performance, write even lower than that would be achieved using SATA II. Maybe it's useless to try to configure a controller that can not ultimately get what it promises, and rely on a more secure connection to the chipset.

[Miguel Reyes]

The error message or icon which is seeing the System tray can be removed easily. To do this, go to Device Manager, open the branch "Storage controllers", you will find the Marvell controller referred to as "Marvell 91xx SATA 6G Controller". Right-click "Properties", go to the tab "Policies" and remove the check mark to "Enable disk safely remove". The next time you reboot the icon should disappear.

[Himalayan]

I also had somewhat similar kind of problem with my Marvell 6GB controller. I assumed that it may be the cause of many things but I didn’t have any information about this. So I asked my friend for help. At the end he finds out that it is one of the ports on the motherboard become faulty and not working good. The port was not stable and due to this I am getting error over the System tray. Then I switched my HDD to a different port after making some adjustment in BIOS. Now I can work with this. Actually I always connected two drives to the Marvell controller but never tried by connecting only one driver on that bad port.

[Laramie]

I also had somewhat similar kind of problem with my Marvell 6GB controller. I assumed that it may be the cause of many things but I didn’t have any information about this. So I asked my friend for help. At the end he finds out that it is one of the ports on the motherboard become faulty and not working good. The port was not stable and due to this I am getting error over the System tray. Then I switched my HDD to a different port after making some adjustment in BIOS. Now I can work with this. Actually I always connected two drives to the Marvell controller but never tried by connecting only one driver on that bad port.

I think that first you should check whether there is any driver installed on or for the Marvell chip or not and then what driver is it. Then you have to check if Marvell controller is appearing under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers in Device Manager, somewhat like Intel SATA controller. It should appear under Storage Controllers. You must know that Intel Chipset Utility will not install any driver for the Marvell controller. You can find the Marvell drivers as: mv91xx.sys, mvxxmm.sys, and mv91xxm.dll. if you have installed these drivers for your motherboard, it is possible to use Microsoft's msahci driver that comes with Windows 7, but I never tried before. For hot-swapping over Marvell ports, you should enable AHCI mode using BIOS for that particular Marvell controller. Make sure that AHCI mode is not available as default setting.