Oh the pain of it all!!!

IM having problems with my computer. Ill give full hardware spec then info of my problem and history.

Gray Box and 300w PSU
AMD XP 2Ghz Athlon
256MB Geil DDR (think its 233)
Asus A7V333 with inbuilt RAID
RAID is Promise MBFastTrak 133 Lite
GeForce FX5200 256

20GB Maxtor as "C" boot on Primary Master
60GB IBM as "D" on Primary Slave
CD on Sec Mas
DVD on Sec Sla
120GB Maxtor as "E" on RAID Pri Ma
160GB Maxtor as "F" on RAID Sec Ma
(NO arrays in RAID, i keep the disks seperate..... i think do anyway)

Windows 2k and newest SP's and updates,
all drivers the newest i can find.
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The problems are/were as follows: A few weeks ago i was starting to get irritation explorer errors. I put up with them for a while as the computer was running perfiectly.

I eventually got sick of them last week as they were jamming the thing up so done some back ups (Hence the 160GB drive i bought new) and wipe wipe wipe. I only done the C drive but my intention was to have lots of clean drives.

I done a kind of rushed windows install which was ok but not perfect at all, i gave u after 2 days when a really horrible "Windows cannot start" message appeared.

I done a slow full reinstal this time. By slow i mean i restarted every time i was asked to before i installed anything else.

Computer much better, less jumpy and error prone. Untill i went to open something from the drives on the RAID and got a wonderfull "Delayed write failure "

I cant find the cause of this as i cant find anywhere to switch of anything associated with delayed write.

I formatted the disks on raid and started again... same problem.

Whilst i have access to two drives and as far as i can see the hardware hasnt tried to put them in any form of array, i cant help but wonder if it is at some strage level.

When i read or write with ANYTHHING i get the error, any progress bar halts and the comp just does nothing, CPU goes to idle %age usage. Anything your doing get slower and slower untill u have to hit the reset button.

I have to use the raid controller as i need the disks.
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Questions that need answered:

1) Has anybody else had this problem? (so i know im not alone)
2) Did you fix it? (so i know not to cry)
3) Should i cry? (see above)
4) Are there any newer drivers/BIOSes than the ones at the ASUS site?
4) How can i switch of delayed write when theres no checkbox?
5) can somebody put up all the places where such an option could exist incase ive missed one.
6) Will a RAID controller still try to do some weird RAIDy thing even although the drives have diffirent capacities and it appears (from windows) not to be doing anything other than what a standared IDE controller does?
7) Should i cry yet?
8) Is there a correct order of driver installation? I normally start from bottom up... i.e. VIA, DX9, video,,,, etc.
9) What do i do to fix it?
10) How did you grow to become patient enough to get to this bit?

Thanks for reading this and double thanks for any help u can provide.

Stuart.

 

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