jcarle

There is a way... Norton Ghost (version 8 I believe)... Disconnect the good drive so that only your failing drive is left. Then connect the new drive that you're shipped. Boot to DOS, ghost the contents of the failing drive to the new drive. Remove the failing drive, connect both good drives and everything should be copacetic. Oh and next time? Buy a Western Digital or Seagate.

The key is to make your PC environment as comfortable as your living room. I have a 7 foot by 5 foot desk with a nice confortable office chair, a 21" NEC monitor, 5.1 surround speakers (Logitech X-530) and a Logitech Rumblepad II gamepad. Gaming on my PC is better then any console because I can do so much more with it.

6 years of consumer computer technician serves me well... lol. Glad it worked out okay for you.

We should get together and do a LAN party one of these days...

I hadn't heard... I've been checking the Western Digital website from time to time because I can't wait for them to release 500GB drives of their own. Guess I must have missed that, they must be killer drives. Perhaps not, you could be lucky. But I'd make frequent backups if I were you.

Registry Mechanic 5.1 works just fine for me.

IMHO... Western Digital is the best. You'll never have any problems as long as you get the 8MB or 16MB buffer models, it's true that the 2MB buffer models are less reliable. See, 8MB, 16MB come with 3 year warranties, while 2MB comes with 1 year. If you want the best reliability, then get their RE (Raid Edition) drives, 5 years warranty. Seagate is also very good, but I've seen a large amount of RMA for them. Mostly failure of the drive motors. Maxtor is horrid. None of them last very long. Fujitsu and Samsung is suicide. Personally, I have 2 Western Digital Raptors running at a smooth 10,000rpm in RAID 0 configuration and the speed is killer.

Download Hitachi's Drive Fitness program, for use with IBM drives as well.

First, test your hard drive using Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for DOS (Floppy), If then you have no errors, then rewrite the Master Boot Record using Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Tools 11 for DOS.

You can't kill a floppy drive. When your CD-Rom won't boot and your Hard Drive won't boot, the only thing that's garanteed to boot everytime is your Floppy. Also, unless you slipstream your drivers, a floppy is absolutely necessary when installed text-mode setup drivers for RAID and SATA.

Gah, don't do that. Just do a windows repair. Boot the machine using the Windows CD, when you get the choice for Recovery Console or Setup, hit [Enter] and start the setup, it'll find the old installation of windows and ask you what you want to do with it, delete, install in a different directory or repair, just hit [R] and it'll start repairing the Windows installation. It looks just like a windows installation, you go through the same steps, but when it starts up the first time, you'll see that everything is exactly the same, just without drivers. Re-install the drivers and you're on your way.

I live in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, 20 mins south of Montréal.

RAID 5 requires a minimum of 3 physical hard drives, and [TOTAL CAPACITY] / [NUMBER OF DRIVES] = [sPACE USED FOR CHECKSUM] Which means for 3 x 80GB hard drives, the total capacity available is 160GB since 80GB is used for checksum.

Changing software will barely have any effect. Decoding, transcoding and encoding are purely CPU related matters. The only real way to speed up that process is by increasing your CPU. In your case, that would require a whole new system.

Google is your friend. How To Install A Hard Drive

Virus?

That was unfortunately a scam that companies did when they released those home cd-recorders. Basically, the machine reads the media code and if it's not a match for what it supports, it spits it out. It COULD write to a standard CD-R, but they programmed the machine to write only to a small list of special "audio" cd-r that they chose so they could sell them for more. They hoped that they could slow down CD copying and made a killing with those who still wanted to do it using home equipment. They flopped and it's very hard nowadays to even find media for it. You're stuck using their media unless you find a way to hack the machine's firmware.

SATA II hard drives do NOT transfer at higher speeds then SATA I. It's already been proven that the physical limitations of current hard drives do not exceed the bandwidth that SATA I provides. They simply aren't fast enough. The advantages of SATA II come with Hot Plugging, NCQ, Staggered Spin-Up and better power management. Also, if you check prices, SATA II hard drives are becoming cheaper then their SATA I equivalents. It's always best to go for the newest possible technology when possible as it avoids upgrade headaches in the future.

Why are you guys making it so complicated? Just go to Windows Update then Hide the update in question and you won't be bothered anymore. (only screenshot link I could find: http://support.gateway.com/s/software/micr...09594su32.shtml)

Making Salmons Feel Needed Microsoft Searching For Nerds Microsoft Searching For Nerds Made Strong For Newbies

It should be noted that a SATA II hard drive WILL work on a SATA I port, there is no need to trade the hard drive. Installing Windows XP on your SATA II hard drive depends on how you've connected your hard drive and how the BIOS is configured. If you've connected your hard drive on the south bridge, it's simply a matter of setting your bios to emulate as IDE. If you've connected your hard drive on the Promise controller, you will need to put the drivers for the Promise controller on disquette and hit F6 to install them during the XP text mode setup.

Unfortunately, the IDE ITE RAID controller supports only IDE hard drives, it does NOT support any optical drives. You can install a maximum of 2 IDE optical drives. However, you can install SATA optical drives as well, or use an external IDE PCI card.

Make sure you install the latest drivers from http://www.ati.com/ to get maximum performance. Video card drivers are constantly being updated, getting the latest version can often make drastic performance differences.

Temperature sounds normal to me. Don't rely too much on the memory information in CPU-Z. Sometimes CPU-Z can be wrong, check your BIOS. Your BIOS settings are the only thing that will be truly accurate. It could be that your BIOS is set for 667MHz memory instead of 800MHz. Also, the timings may be at the BIOS' default. You can manually set them to the specifications specified by your memory.

Drivers are available at http://support.asus.com/download/download_...P5WD2%20Premium. As for the hard drive being third master, that's normal. To enable maximum compatibility, SATA channels appear as individual IDE channels. Since you can only plug one hard drive per SATA channel, it automatically configures the drive as a master. SATA channels are configured after regular IDE channels, so your hard drive is actually connected in the correct location.