JMB38X Power Management Causes Vista Hang

Original date: June 4, 2009 10:30 PM by sonnik

The ongoing issues with "dialing in" my new laptop continue. This problem was manifesting as an occasional "hang" shortly after Windows startup. This time, it's the JMicron supplied flash media controller.

Of course, once you get a new machine and experience minor issues like this, isolating it can be a minor headache. I've installed various other applications, like TrueCrypt. I was beginning to speculate that it's possible that an application was directly accessing the hard drive (bypassing TrueCrypt for decryption) and getting confused, thus causing the hang.

This hang was an annoyance, so I didn't tear into it right away. I did not that no hang was present using the Linux operating system that was also installed on the same machine. Encryption was not installed on this partition.

I had an idea to check the Vista Event Viewer (Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Event Viewer). As I noted the approximate time of the hangs, I found the following entry in the "Windows Logs -> Application" section.

wuaueng.dll (548) SUS20ClientDataStore: A request to read from the file "C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore\DataStore.edb" at offset 43032576 (0x000000000290a000) for 135168 (0x00021000) bytes succeeded, but took an abnormally long time (60 seconds) to be serviced by the OS. This problem is likely due to faulty hardware. Please contact your hardware vendor for further assistance diagnosing the problem.

So, in regards to this new machine, you've noticed that I've had problems burning recovery discs and a peculiar hard drive noise. It would be very easy with the text of the message above (as it states the terms "faulty hardware") that I've got a lemon of a laptop.

After checking the "Windows Logs -> System" section, I found the following message...

The device 'JMB38X xD Host Controller' (PCI\VEN_197B&DEV_2384&SUBSYS_30F7103C&REV_00\4&17d1176a&0&04E4) disappeared from the system without first being prepared for removal.

This was odd. I had just noticed that Windows Update was trying to push through an optional update with a new driver for this very device. I told Windows Update to accept this update, but I received an error message that stated that Windows won't allow you to install drivers via Windows Update if the device isn't "attached to the system". Based on the above error message, Windows did not believe I had this device attached to the system.

After poking around, I discovered that the system BIOS had an option to disable power management issues. I had just early upgraded from the "HP dv4-1280us" BIOS version F.31 that shipped with the laptop, to version F.34 from the Hewlett Packard support web site. I can only assume that this option was always present (even in previous versions of the BIOS), I simply had not noticed it until now. I set the "Power Management in Flash Controller" option to "Disabled".

Once I rebooted, the hang disappeared. I was even able to take the Windows Update driver update to receive a new driver dated April 17, 2009.

System Logs do not always help when you're having a mysterious issue like this. But it is nice when they do.