Z690-G RAID1 always unsafe shutdown on clean power off

[spatula75]

Still having this problem unfortunately, and hopeful that someone else may have seen it by now.

My boot drive is a RAID-1, comprised of a pair of M.2 Samsung SSD 980 Pro 2TB drives using VMD. I'm running Windows 11 Pro.

The issue is that 100% of the time, when I power the machine off, the RAID believes it has not been shut down cleanly (and the unsafe shutdown count increases for each drive), and on the next boot it goes through verifying everything again. It never finds any errors in the process, which makes me suspect that the final sync/flush probably DID happen, but the disks weren't marked clean before shutting down. This is reproducible always.

This problem does NOT happen when rebooting, only when powering completely off.

The RST VMD Controller and RST VMD Managed Controller driver versions are both 19.0.0.1067, which is the current release from the driver page. This happened both with the 1003 BIOS and now with the 1403 BIOS.

[spatula75]

STARRAIN@ROG wrote:
Hi spatula75,
Did you switch off the PSU after shutdown the pc?
Did you capture a photo of a RAID verify starting upon restarting the machine?
May I have a photo of it and a screenshot of unsafe shutdown count?
Thank you.

I generally do not switch off the PSU after shutting down the computer. Usually I only shut down when I need to do some kind of hardware maintenance or if there has been a prolonged power outage and my UPS is running out of battery, so it's not something that happens often.

After I'm done running Driver Verifier for a week, I'll get you some screen shots and some video, but it will be Saturday at the earliest, unless whichever driver has been causing system hangs reveals itself sooner.

[STARRAIN_ROG]

Hi spatula75,
Could you please plug the pc directly into wall outlet to see if the unsafe shutdown count is also increasing after you are done running Driver Verifier?
I'll wait for your video and screenshots.
Thank you for your help.

[spatula75]

Just a follow-up to this for anyone else having the same problem later...

The problem turned out to be that although I'd disabled Fast Boot in the BIOS and Fast Startup in Windows, some Windows update (or something) came along and turned Fast Startup back on in the Windows power options (rude).

Apparently Windows would shut down, presuming that it was going to be Fast Booted later, but what actually happened was the BIOS shut everything down completely, having Fast Boot disabled.

Turning Fast Startup back off in Windows so that the setting matched that of Fast Boot in the BIOS alleviated the trouble.

(Unfortunately I was never able to resolve the other, more significant problem of the motherboard randomly shutting off power every 3 days or so, and I had to replace the motherboard.)