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.