[ThunderT]

I've got a doozie of a problem:

I've been running my system fine without any problems, including up to last night. Now, this morning, I turned it on, and it got as far as the screen showing the IRQ settings and the other misc. hardware info, and then it was ready to go to the Windows load screen, but instead, the screen went blank. Now, the monitor's LED is blue which for my monitor means it's getting a video signal, but there is nothing else happening.

I suspect there is something wrong with the motherboard's RAID chip. I have the MSI KT333 Ultra ARU model. I'm running 2x80GB Western Digital P-ATA hard drives. There is no LED activity from the hard drives during boot up, but the utility that runs when booting that checks the raid states that the array is functional. I unplugged one of the drives and it correctly told me that the array was offline, and then told me it was functional when I plugged it in again. I've tried booting off my Windows CD, but the screen freezes when it gets to the "Checking hardware configuration info".

As you can imagine, I'm really quite confused. The system is extremely stable, and I've had no problems. One thing I haven't done is connect the 4 diagnostic LED's that came with the motherboard, but I'm not sure how much that will help since it seems clear that the hard drives aren't running (or not being asked to run).

Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated!

Specs:
AMD Athlon XP 2400+
MSI KT3 Ultra ARU
1 GB PC-2700
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
2 x 80 GB Western Digital P-ATA in RAID 0
Lite-On DVD-RW
Toshiba DVD-ROM
Antec 430 TruePower
SB Audigy 2 ZS
Intel NIC

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I really don't know much about raid as I never delved into it. Did you try resetting bios to defaults. Perhaps you're have some other hardware conflict during boot. Also, I know you mentioned no HD activity, but try booting to safe mode anyways. Maybe a call to normal windows is not there and the F8 interupt will bypass that and let you go to safe mode.

It looks like you built this machine and know how to troubleshoot, but I'll say it anyways... disconnect all peripheral hardware, including modem and router so they don't interfere with anything.

makai

[makai]

I really don't know much about raid as I never delved into it. Did you try resetting bios to defaults. Perhaps you're have some other hardware conflict during boot. Also, I know you mentioned no HD activity, but try booting to safe mode anyways. Maybe a call to normal windows is not there and the F8 interupt will bypass that and let you go to safe mode.

It looks like you built this machine and know how to troubleshoot, but I'll say it anyways... disconnect all peripheral hardware, including modem and router so they don't interfere with anything.

makai

[ThunderT]

Thanks for the reply. I put the jumper on the motherboard into "reset" for a few seconds and then put it back into "normal". When I powered on the machine, I reset all the settings in BIOS and rebooted and Windows loaded without a hitch. I have no idea what happened to get the system out of shape, but I'm glad to be back in business. Thanks again for the reply.