sexconker

Well I tried again yesterday. Used the clean XP SP3 image, dumped the 10, whatever drivers (from the nForce 15.25 package) into it with nLite (as well as an update pack and a bunch of tweaks). Worked like a charm.

Thanks for the reply. Acronis worked and I'm back on the afflicted machine with no problems (with yesterday's image). 2 GB of RAM. I've got the P6N SLI-Fi, not the SLI Platinum I guess (so no eSata and no second SATA controller). This is the optical drive I used to install the OS initially (onto my RAID array). I'll try with the clean XP + XP3 retail disc, nLite the drivers (from here) onto it, and see what happens. Now that I know Acronis works (never actually tested the restore before). Perhaps this weekend / the next 3-day weekend. This was way too much drama for a Monday. I'll update here with whatever happens.

So I got the bright idea of reformatting today. I busted out my XP SP3 + RAID CD, which I used in the past, and I got nothing but fail. I'm dealing with 3 drives in RAID 0 on an MSI P6N SLI Platinum (not V2) - an nForce 650i SLI board. The first attempts resulted in the ol' 0x0000007B BSOD after the initial loading of drivers and such ("Setup is starting Windows" I think). So I went about clearing my array and breaking it and rebuilding it and trying again. Still failed. I played around a bit with Acronis to see if I could just restore my backup image, but since it would have taken ages, I figured I would continue working on the issue. I then built another CD based on the existing CD - I just added the latest drivers I could grab from MSI's site. I got past the first hurdle, and XP was able to see and partition and format my drive. It then failed on the next reboot with some error about a bad disk configuration. I checked out the boot.ini file (Acronis was able to see my array and partition, read from it, and write to it) and noticed some weirdness, which I attempted to fix. Didn't help. I rebuilt my array again, and ran the installer from this new (XP + SP3 + old drivers + new drivers) CD again. This time I got as far as setting up language options and entering the serial and such. On the next reboot (what should have been the first real boot into Windows) I got a quick blue screen followed by a soft reboot. I'm currently trying to restore my backup image with Acronis, but with the way things have been going today, I don't have high hopes. I AM using a SATA optical drive, as it's the only optical drive I have. I CAN'T set individual SATA ports to IDE/RAID mode (maybe I could in a previous BIOS version for my board?). Any ideas? I'm currently hunting down a "fresh" XP + SP3 disc, and I'll drop the drivers recommended here on it and try again (though if the restore from the backup works, I may just quit while I'm ahead). Does anyone know the keyboard shortcuts to enable hidden options in MSI BIOSs? I believe it was something like alt+F2, shift+F4. I dunno. Maybe that reveals the option to set SATA ports to RAID/IDE individually. I'd hate to have to hunt down an IDE drive, but I may have to. (Curious - why does a SATA optical drive in RAID mode cause issues?) I'll also run deep scans on my hard drives (they passed the quick scans), or try various combinations of 2 drives in RAID 0 (with the 3rd drive disconnected). What really bothers me is that I used this disc before and everything went fine.

Never solved it. It hasn't happened the last few times we've restarted (I don't think), though. I believe one of the last things we did was update the network card drivers, though, that may have been for another server with a different issue... If your machine is unable to boot properly from a cold boot (power off, wait a few seconds, power on) then it's probably not the same issue. The issue we had was specifically for a soft restart / warm boot / whatever you want to call it.

We've got a file server running Server 2003, and whenever we do a restart on it (like last night, for the RPC patch), the thing hangs just before the login screen. You can't connect to it remotely. You can't connect to it remotely with /admin. You can't log in at the console. You just get a blank blue background where the login box should be. There are no errors or anything interesting in the system log. The odd thing is all the services (file shares, domain controller, etc) work fine when the machine is in this state. I don't know if we can issue any remote commands to it (such as logging into another server on the network and trying a remote restart), but I'll remember to try it the next time this happens. What we end up doing is physically killing the power (5 seconds on the power button), then doing a cold boot, which works perfectly fine. Any ideas? Thanks.

So I go through the install and everything works normally, and when I get to the desktop (Administrator), the IE shortcut has a busted icon. Double clicking the icon copies the shortcut (to the desktop), instead of opening IE. I can run IE manually (iexplore), but the damned thing says "Internet explorer cannot find..." for everything. Network is fine. Installed FireFox, it's fine. Installing IE7 manually seems to have fixed it. Has anyone seen this before? Not a huge issues, but I would like to fix it and remake my disc...