Trusted Drive Manager Warning filling up Event Viewer

Have a strange issue we're trying to sort out that seems to be affecting all our E6500's.

The Application log in event viewer is filled with warnings from Trusted Drive Manager, the details are ' Invalid ATAPI version ' that repeat every 30 seconds or so and fills up the event log.

This happens on all stock (as shipped) Dell e6500's with finger print readers when the TPM chip is enabled in the bios and Security Manager is setup for login with biometric (finger print).

As a test, I did a fresh Vista x86 install on one system and loaded all the latest Dell drivers and it still exibits the exact same issue.

We don't use the Trusted Drive Manager function, just the bio-log in, but there doesn't seem to be a way to disable it.

Called Dell support and they don't have a clue as to what's causing it and suggested restoring the factory default image. Did this and once Embassy Wave is started and the reader enabled the issue returns.

I've placed a call into Wave Systems, but their support doesn't seem interested in trying to help and keep refering us back to Dell.

Anyone else have this issue and know how to resolve it ?

 

SOLVED: Change SATA mode from IRRT to AHCI in system bios.

Thought I'd update my own post after some trial and error.

Seems Wave's TDM drivers aren't compatible with IRRT and even tho you're not using TDM it still installs these drivers as part of Security Manager.

Switching to AHCI in the bios completely resolves the issue.

 

Thanks for the update.

I switched over from IRRT to AHCI to stop the computer thinking that I wanted to set a RAID when I plugged in a eSATA HDD.

However, some people have reported BSODs when switching the HDD mode from IRRT to AHCI. I think the Dell factory Windows installation has pre-loaded all the relevant drivers but a normal user installation only loads the drivers needed for the current mode. did you have any issues after switching the HDD mode.

John

 

Hi John, this is exactly right.
Fortunately, we have quite a few E6500's here so I was able to try to this on various setups.

Here's how it plays out.

- Systems with Dell factory Vista installs can switch form IRRT to AHCI and boots with no problem.

- Systems with customs Vista installs blue screen when switching from IRRT to AHCI modes.

I tried the reg edit to enable msahci.sys at start, but that didn't solve the issue.

At this point I have to say that our custom installs are significantly faster, lighter and quicker than the Dell factory setups. Boot is also about half the time.

Since we already syspreped an image for these customs installs I had to try to find another way to fix this issue without having to change from IRRT to AHCI.

On closer look, here's the actual issue with Trusted Drive Manager.

When you install Dell CP Security Manager it installs the entire Embassy Wave suite, including Trusted Drive Manager, which has ATA and AHCI drivers (none for IRRT/Raid).

Trusted Drive Manager (TDM) in itself is useless if you don't have a Seagate trusted drive. Which our systems don't and it's not a feature we intend to use. I can just imagine our users getting locked out of their drives. No thanks.

Anyways, for whatever reason Dell's CP Security Manager installs and enables TDM by default even tho the capable drive isn't present. You can verify this by looking in running services, tdmservice.exe and it's supporting services are started chewing up valuable resources.

THE FIX - if you don't want/can't switch from IRRT to AHCI

-Uinstall Dell CP Security Manager
-Reboot system
-Reinstall Dell CP Security Manager this time choosing 'custom setup'

During the reinstall, the first custom setup is for Dell CP, leave everything selected. It will then proceed to the Wave Systems custom install. There's you'll have checkboxes for Embassy Security suite, Security Wizard and so on. The last box is Trusted Drive Manager.
Select the features you want installed. Embassy must be installed, for the fingerprint reader to function for secure login. The rest is optional.
Leave Trusted Drive manager unchecked and proceed to install.

Reboot and the TDM, the tdmservice, and the errors are no longer present and secure login works just fine.

I also had a conversation yesterday with a senior dell tech and another with Wave systems. They both agreed that there's a few short commings on the present package.

1. IRRT drivers should be included in the DELL/Wave package since Dell defaults these to IRRT from the factory.

2. TDM should NOT nstalled by the default CP Security setup if the a TDM capable drive is not present on the system. In fact it shouldn't even be an option.

In any case the reinstall solution works for us and is simplest since we can mod this into our sysprep image once and then flash all system the same without needing any changes to the bios. Something I was dreading really.

Everything is functioning really well now on our prototype build.

Hope this info helps.
Cheers

 

Thanks for this very helpful info.

There should be a way of retrospectively installing the AHCI drivers by doing a manual driver install. I've sure I did it last year on another notebook.

John