Help me to help a friend

[damocles]

A friend is having problems with his computer locking when transferring large files or when he attempts to run a scan disk or defragment his drives

He doesn't know an awful lot about hardware, so getting ll the relevant info has been hard

What i know is

-He has an Abit board sporting a P3 800
-It has Highpoint Raid, but he is using a Promise raid card
- He has 3 Raided Drives 2x 75 Gig and 1x 60

Does anything spring to mind?

I'll get him to check if his board is Via based, but beyond it being a 4-1 issue, i'm stumped

 

[Pederv]

Check to see if the RAID card has it's own IRQ. And I don't mean in the Windows Device Manager, I mean in the bios. I do this by either being VERY fast with the pause key or by booting with a floppy with ONLY the system files on it. The reason for this is most motherboards pop up a list of devices on the PCI/AGP bus and what IRQ the bios has assigned them. The only way to get devices so they don't share resources at level is to change what slot they're plugged into.

 

[damocles]

Thanks i'll check when i se ehim. Doesn't 2k assign everything to the same IRQ+ though?

 

[Pederv]

Windows tries to handle all calls to a device but sometimes the call has to go to the bios.
When I was running the RAID on my KT7-RAID, I had the NIC sharing resources (at the BIOS level) with the RAID controller. Everytime I did some heavy network transfers my system crashed, so I put the RAID controller on it's own IRQ and the problem was gone.