[MaineDan]

The only thing uner ATA/ATAPI conytollers is NVidia nForce4 Parallel ATA Controller. The "Let BIOS Mode Select" box is checked on primary and secondary channels. In the shaded box it says 3 different types of FMA, 1 for each device, none of which is hard drives. This PC is using RAID 0, 2 160G's striped if makes a difference.

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Sorry, just read my last post. Meant 3 diffrent types of DMA, not FMA.

[MaineDan]

Sorry, just read my last post. Meant 3 diffrent types of DMA, not FMA.

[rshaffer61]

What you want is DMA if available.

[MaineDan]

The 3 devices are CDROM's, not hard drives. Do you want me to change those? The hard drives are listed under the Serial ATA Controller

[rshaffer61]

Then they probably will not be affected.
If you check and dma is available then yes change them to that.
You do have a XP installation disk I take it?

[MaineDan]

Yes I do have the install disk. I was going to repair the install but because of the RAID stripe it is asking for the 3rd party software to be installed because it doesn't see the drives. I am fearful that the drives will be wiped clean if I do that. The repair I was going to use was the one that comes up when you say to install and it finds the previous install. Not the Recovery option. I also thought about ghosting the striped drives onto 1 and then doing the repair, would have gotten rid of the RAID at that point. Just trying to fix without having to wipe clean.

[rshaffer61]

Ahh you have a raid setup. Now that is a problem as I never have used raid in the 15 years I have been doing this. I know there are some techs who are good at it.
I will see if i can grab one to join us.

[rshaffer61]

Well the agreement at this point is doing a repair on a Raid system is full of stress and most likely would not be successful in the end.
With that the only way i see this working now is to backup the important data and start over.

[MaineDan]

By start over you mean wipe clean and reload I assume?

[rshaffer61]

Yes and that is why I mentioned to backup all you important data as that can't be replaced. Programs can be reloaded once you are setup.

[MaineDan]

Was afraid of that but I understand. I think I will do away with the Striped RAID on this go around so I don't run into this again. Thanks for the assistance. Appreciate it.

[rshaffer61]

Another word of advice since you are doing away with striped. When you save data try saving it to one of the other drives and that way if main drive does ever go down your data will be safe. Another suggestion is doing backups of your data files every week or so to have a second set also. Never to careful when it comes to your data.

[Troy]

In theory the repair install should fix things fine, however in practise I've rarely seen it work properly. I will not ever recommend RAID 0 at all. I will only recommend RAID if you have the budget to get proper server-grade hardware (hard drives and controller) and it is not cheap.

And of course, backups are a must, regardless of RAID or not. RAID is not backups.

Regards

Troy