Archive for December, 2012

AMD SB8XX RAID + Windows 8 = BSOD

Hardware, Windows 8 | Posted by p_lider December 18th, 2012

If you are using RAID feature of AMD SB8XX chipsets you can encounter a lot of BSODs when using Windows 8 even during system installation. This is caused by a buggy amdsbs.sys driver which is integrated into Windows 8 distribution media.

To be able to successfully install Windows 8 in such situation you must set SATA controller mode of system hard disk to IDE for the time of system installation. After the system is installed first thing to do is to install the newest RAID driver from AMD site and disable the buggy amdsbs.sys driver in the registry (without disabling it you will still sporadically encounter BSODs even though the newer and bug free driver from AMD is installed). To completely disable the buggy driver you have to perform the following steps:

  1. Open Registry Editor
  2. Navigate to the “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\amdsbs” key.
  3. In the right pane find “Start” parameter, double click it and set its value to 4.
  4. Close the Registry Editor and reboot the system.

After installing the newest RAID driver and disabling the buggy one, you can set back the SATA mode of your disks to RAID and the Windows will be working stable now.

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PHP and IIS7 using FastCGI – HTTP 500 error

IIS | Posted by p_lider December 18th, 2012

When you install a php into IIS7 and try to execute phpinfo() script you can get an HTTP 500 Internal Server Error message. The most probably cause of this is that php-cgi.exe program is writing some text to stderr. By default IIS7 displays an HTTP 500 error message when it detects such behavior even, when the CGI displayed only a warning message on stderr. To avoid this problem you have to change default error handling for FastCGI in IIS7.

To do this follow the following steps:

  1. Start IIS Manager
  2. Click on <server name> and then in the right pane go to “FastCGI Settings”.
  3. Right click on php-cgi.exe file and choose “Edit…”.
  4. Set the “Standard error mode” option to “IgnoreAndReturn200” value.
  5. Click OK and close IIS Manager.

After performing mentioned steps you shall no longer see HTTP 500 error messages in the browser.

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