Constant boot problems

[tacouch]

Ok this is driving me nuts.

I have a PC with 4 SATA drives and 2 IDE drives.

The problem I'm having is placing the OS totally on the 4 SATA's in
Raid 0+1 while the IDE drives are connected and will have other OS's on
them.

My first attempt to do a triple boot went just fine. I had XP Pro on
the SATA Raid array, Linspire one IDE 1 and Xandros on IDE 2. All were
bootable all were accessible and worked just fine.

So after a few hours of steady use of Xandros trying to figure out how
to install the Linux drivers correctly for my printer I go to boot back
into XP to finish install my applications. Xandros boot loader comes up
I chose windows and bam I get a boot error from XP.

Something along the lines of Hal.dll is missing or corrupt. Ok so I
Google the piss out of it. Find out its more then likely a messed up
boot.ini

I load the XP CD, launch recovery. No login prompt. Thinking ok maybe I
forgot to place a root admin password in during setup.

So I then run the Map command. It comes back with
C:\ 100MB (the fat32 partition for boot)
D:\ unknown format (Linux partitions)
C and D on same physical Drive
E:\ unknown format (Linux partition)
F:\ 512 (has some more XP stuff
G:\ CD Rom
A:\ Floppy

Dir C:\ shows the boot.ini is on C. So I try listing the contents of
the Boot.ini. Can't find it even though I can see it with dir. Attrib
command fails with invalid attribute error. At this point I'm more than
a little frustrated. So I try one last time to rebuild the boot.ini
nothing. I can't even rip IDE 1 out and slave it in another tower as
all I have is a laptop.

So I use the bios utility to wipe out the array so that it looks like 4
HD's again and then I write 0's to all 6 drives and use a win98 boot
disk to fdisk /mbr all the drives. Then I run manufacture drive
utilities on all the drives. All come back as peachy.

I reconstruct the raid array install XP onto the array. Update XP with
chipset drivers. Go to Windows update, load all critical updates and
install netframe work so that I can install all components of ATI Cat
drivers. Reboot several times during the process and after last boot
when I go to start installing Display drivers I get

"Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware
configuration problem.

Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk
hardware.

Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk
configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional
information."

Which from what I can tell is just another way of saying boot.ini if
messed up again.

I try recovery console one more time. No login prompt again. Same as
before. I can see files boot Attrib and bootcfg have no effect and CD
to different drives has no effect.

I ran XP in raid 0 for over a year on the IDE drives just freaking
fine. I then updated to 4 WD drives designed for Raid setups for a
month. I then add the two IDE drives back in to mess with Linux again
and bam XP refuses to work just because its boot files are on an IDE
drive and the OS is on a SATA Raid array.

Can anyone give me any insight as to what the heck I'm doing wrong?

Specs.
Abit AN8 NF-CK804 (Bios 20)
AMD Athlon 64 3200+
ATI X600 Pro VIVO 256MB PCI-X
2 512MB DDR400 CL3 PC3200 (Dual Channel)
2 80gig Seagate 7200 Rpm 8MB Cache ATA 100
4 250Gig WDC RE 7200 Rpm 8MB Cache Serial ATA150 (Raid 0+1)
Nvraid/NvMass Storage Driver v1.05
Lite On DVD+-R/RW-CD+-R/RW
ANTEC TRUE430 ATX RTL

 

[DL]

I noticed another post from some one having problems with multi boot using
sata and ide, no resolution as yet.
PS probably not relevent but is you psu up to it? I had a problem with a
true pwr unit & sata raid

 

[tacouch]

I would have to say yes my PSU is up to the task as my voltages are all
nominal when fired up and checking via bios and in windows with the
uGuru tool. But I'll see if I can find a decent wattage calculator and
double check I'm not stressing the 430 Watts the PSU is rated for.

But its something to monitor to see if theres a suden voltage drop.
Just got to figure out how to do it during reboots. That gives me an
idea. I'll see if it happens only on reboots or total power downs. The
other option is to roll the bios back to its original version since I
only updated it a month or so ago and see if maybe this new version
introduced a power issue that I didn't stumble onto placing a total of
6 drives in.

Thanks for the ideas.

 

[tacouch]

Alright I did some calculations at several PS sites. I'm close to the
PSU's limits if all the parts are pulling peak wattage. So I ordered a
new PS.

But I don't think thats the problem. Today while messing around I
noticed that as long as the XP install disk was in the DVD drive I
booted just fine. I tried other disks and if it wasn't the XP disk I
got the dreaded hal.dll error.

So now I'm really stumped as to what the heck is going on.