Guidance for Injecting the Intel® RST Driver into Windows Pre-Installation Environment* (WinPE*) for Intel® Optane™ Memory or Intel® RAID Volume

Documentation

Install & Setup

000055157

08/31/2022

The CheckDisk (CHKDSK) tool may report the error message Error detected in index $I30 for file… when the system resumes booting into Windows® 10 OS. This can occur if a system that has either a Software Remapped Intel® Optane™ memory volume or a Software Remapped Intel® RAID volume boots into WinPE* for offline Windows* image maintenance. See below for more details on how to prevent this issue on your system.

Environment

The instructions mentioned in this guide are based on the following system environment:

  • Platforms with Software Remapped Intel® Optane™ memory volume or Software Remapped Intel® RAID volume.
    • Software Remapped Intel® Optane™ memory volume means Intel® Optane™ memory volume that has either:
      • An Intel® Optane™ memory M device connected to a CPU-attached NVMe* M.2 port; or
      • An Intel® Optane™ memory H device connected to a PCH-attached NVMe M.2 port with Intel® Optane™ memory volume enabled
    • Software Remapped Intel® RAID volume means RAID volume that has at least one Intel® NVMe device attached to a CPU-attached NVMe M.2 port.
  • Intel® Rapid Storage Technology (Intel® RST) driver version 16.x or 17.x.
  • WinPE booting image.

Details of CheckDisk Tool Error Report

If an Intel® Rapid Storage Technology (Intel® RST) driver is not injected into WinPE before a system with Software Remapped Intel® Optane™ memory volume or Software Remapped Intel® RAID volume boots into WinPE, then when the system boots into WinPE, WinPE will load the default Microsoft NVMe* driver on the NVMe drives that make up Software Remapped Intel® Optane™ memory volume or Software Remapped Intel® RAID volume when it detects a known file system. 

Microsoft NVMe driver and Intel® RST driver architecture for Software Remapped Intel® Optane™ memory volume or Software Remapped Intel® RAID volume are not compatible. Therefore NVMe drives that make up the Software Remapped Intel® Optane™ memory volume and Software Remapped Intel® RAID volume become visible in WinPE as regular NVMe pass-through drives. 

If the NVMe drives contain known file system data, such as GUID Partition Table, WinPE will read and write to the NVMe drives’ partition and may result in CheckDisk reporting a file error.

Steps to take to prevent the issue

If an user wants to use WinPE to make changes to Windows operating system installed on the system’s Software Remapped Intel® Optane™ memory volume or Software Remapped Intel® RAID volume, please follow one of these two options: 

  1. Inject the desired version of the Intel® RST driver into their WinPE image first before attempting to boot the desired configured system into WinPE.
    • Injecting the Intel® RST driver means adding the Intel® RST driver to WinPE’s boot.wim file. For specific instructions on how to inject the Intel® RST driver to the WinPE boot image check WinPE: Mount and Customize. 
  2. Disable Software Remapped Intel® Optane™ memory volume or Software Remapped Intel® RAID volume before attempting to boot into WinPE.