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Marakith · Guest

Hello,

I'm desperate for advice and hope that someone here can help me.

I have had an NF7-S motherboard rig for over 3 years. I recently
upgraded to another machine and decided to give the old rig to my
mother.

I'm running:
NF7-S (v2)
2x SATA HDDs (not in raid)
GeForce 6800GT
1Gb RAM
All at stock

I reformatted the drive and installed Windows again. This time, I even
upgraded to Service Pack 2.

To install Windows, I had to press F6 in order to install some Silicon
Image drivers to get the drives recognised. I am NOT running a RAID
array, but have found that the only way to get Windows to see the
drives is via the Silicon Image driver.

I took the PC over to my mum's house and set it up. One thing that
scared me a little was that the PC refused to power up first time. The
Mobo LED went faint and died slowly after power was turned on. I
checked the cables, saw that nothing noticeable was amiss and tried
again. This time it started up.

About at week later, the PC got a Blue Screen of Death. It went into
an infite loop of bootup and reboot. Over and over. The BSOD flashed
up so fast you could barely see it, so I got windows (using F8) to
allow me to see it and saw: UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME. I fixed it using
CHKDSK /R.

Someone advised me that perhaps the drive was on its way out. So I
replaced it and reinstalled windows. It failed again with a week. My
mum completely lost confidence in the Rig and I setup her old PC
again.

I'd like my partner (who lives with me) to use the PC. That way I'm
around when the thing goes wrong. So I setup windows again. This time
it died after two weeks. My partner uses the PC a lot less than my mum
does.

This time, the NTFS.SYS is corrupted. I can't get into recovery
console and I can't overwrite the windows install.

I have:

1] Replaced the hard-drive
2] Switched off Quick startup in the BIOS, so that a memory test is
performed on startup. I've noticed that the memory counts up to the
full Gig. then starts again. That's not right, is it?
3] Run Memtest for 8 hours with no reported problems.
4] Installed an SP1 version of windows then upgraded to SP2.
5] Installed a version of windows with SP2 already on it.
6] Considered swapping the PSU. But have been told this probably isn't
the problem.
7] Replaced the cables between the Motherboard and the SATA drives in
case they were faulty.

I'd love to know if there's some sort of monitoring software that can
pinpoint the problem, or if this is a known problem with Abit, Silicon
Image and Service Pack 2?

Would be really grateful for your advice.

..\\

lkboop · Guest

Marakith wrote:

Guest

Thanks for the reply guys!

Yes - I was using two drives non RAID before.

I'm considering just getting another SATA card and installing that, so
going around the problem with the NF7 drive controller totally.

A new PSU is also something I'm considering.

Guest

Thanks for the reply guys!

Yes - I was using two drives non RAID before.

I'm considering just getting another SATA card and installing that,
so
going around the problem with the NF7 drive controller totally.

A new PSU is also something I'm considering.

MtnGoat · Guest

On 8 Mar 2007 03:55:01 -0800, marakith@gmail.com wrote: