Well, I should know better, but yesterday I decided it was time to re-install WinXP Pro on my main computer. It had been exhibiting some strange behavior, including slow to non-existant shutdowns (I had to physically push the power button), and occasional blue screens crashes.
The first install went fine, except that I left all my drives connected so that WinXP designated my boot drive as I: (it was on a SATA RAID0 Array). So I disconnected the other drives and repeated the initial install. During the video card installation, something hiccupped and the system would not boot. So I started again! This time, I completed the initial installation which consisted of WinXP w/ SP1, SP2 upgrade, Virus protection, Video drivers and True Image 11. I made an image of the boot drive. As a precaution, I booted to the rescue disk and discovered that True Image 11 saw only one SATA drive out of 6 drives and one RAID0 array. Stranger, the one drive it did see shared a controller with another drive which True Image 11 DID NOT see! I tried to move the SATA RAID0 array back to the nVidia SATA controllers hoping that might be the problem. No Luck. Furthermore, when I tried to boot the system, I got a message that I MUST activate before I could log on. This was on a system that had been installed less than an hour earlier. What happened to the 30 day activation period?! At this point I was getting ready to panic because I could not get WinXP installed nor could I use my True Image backups to restore to the original state. I have restored numerous times using this system, and now suddenly, nothing is working or being recognized. I was finally able to get back to a working system by moving the drive with the image to another computer, installing the image on that drive and moving it back to the original system. I then used THAT instance of WinXP to copy the image back to the SATA RAID0 array. As long as True Image was utilized within WinXP, it would work. As soon as it re-booted (to Linux), it no longer recognized the SATA RAID0 array or any other SATA disk, save 1. At this point, I am considering some sort of hardware failure/problem. I re-installed the BIOS and saw no difference. I am at a loss on where to look next. I would really like to get this setup working without issue as it is my main work computer. If I can't get it working without problems, I would have to put together a new system. Since this is a socket939 with DDR400, it would probably require new MB, new CPU and new Memory. I would rather not spend that much right now. Other possible issue: The Opteron 185 requires the use of a beta BIOS on this motherboard, a Gigabyte GA-K8N Ultra-9 nForce4 Ultra. Any insight would be most appreciated. I spent about 24 hours just to get back to where I started! Another 8-10 hours trying to figure out what was going on. Thanks, Jim Maki [EMAIL PROTECTED]
