booting nearly to password screen and reboots

[Dewpaw]

I am running XP Pro on a Gigabyte MB with an Athlon 1800+ and a gig of memory. I have (2) 60 gig HDD with a RAID 0 configuration. When I fire her up everything goes fine until I see the Win XP splashscreen, as it switches to the password window the screen blacks out, the hard drives make a little racket, a blue screen jumps out for a zillionth of a second and the process is looped back to boot.

I tried the backup bios to no avail. I cleared the cmos and installed a new battery. I took everything out of the case and reinstalled. I tried to reinstall XP and boot from a backup disk---it doesn't find the hard drives. I put in my Partition Magic boot disk and it says error 1516 Partition C unproperly dismounted. Is there anyone out there in cyber land that can give me an idea if this is a recoverable problem?

Thanks, Don

 

[pyrojunkie]

What is the blue screen error?

 

[Dewpaw]

My feeble eyes aren't anywhere close to being fast enough to figure a single letter

 

[pyrojunkie]

Have you tried booting to safe mode. It sounds like it is restarting on a startup program loading crash, if it gets as far as the logon screen.

 

[Dewpaw]

It won't go into Safe Mode---just says it can't detect a hard drive

 

[pyrojunkie]

Sounds like one of the drives in your RAID setup has failed. You'll need to enter the RAID setup and check the status of your array. If a drive has failed it is impossible to reclaim any data.

 

[Dewpaw]

At the Fastrak page it lists my hard drive array as 'functioning'

 

[pyrojunkie]

Hmm...

Is this a new setup? Have you ever had it working properly?

 

[Dewpaw]

It's been working fairly well for 3 years