"Tim" wrote in message ...
Karen,

Your problems may be due to either the location of the boot files, or the
fact that you are / were on bios F8, or a combination of factors. I
suggest you try bios F10 and see if that resolves your issues. Before you
do and If not...

If you place a disk drive on a controller that preceeds the current boot
disc - you can't expect the system to boot. EG if your bios is set with
the following boot order: Floppy , CD, HDD - and you leave a floppy in the
drive it won't boot will it? (OK some bios are smart). Don't expect it to
boot if you put an IDE HDD in front of the boot IDE HDD.

Generally the boot disc should be on the lowest numbered device (in
hardware search order terms) of its type and the boot device type should
be set correctly. IE if you say to boot off IDE, then the boot device
"should" be on IDE Primary on IDE 0.

Now, you confuse things a little by entitling your post RAID.... but there
after only talk about IDE... If you are using RAID then please be careful
with the bios version you use.

Check your BOOT drive:

Put the drives back where they were originally and go into Disk Management
in Computer Management under XP and check where the BOOT drive is. Then
check where the BOOT.ini, and ntldr are. These may not be where you think
they are so this either needs fixing or you need to always remember this.
When you have confirmed where everything is, then if there is a problem
fix it first (EG do a repair and put the boot components on the front of
the Win98 disc since that has to be C: in its own view of things), then
when you alter the disc configuration always keep in mind where whatever
is, how the bios is set, and review the bios settings before attempting to
boot.

IMHO, there is only 1 bios to use on 8KNXP rev 1 and that is F10. You
should not go back to an ancient pre-production bios version such as a
version 2 - maybe you meant F7? F5 was bad enough - if you had been using
RAID this could have trashed your drives. There were substantial issues
with RAM timings with bios revisions prior to and including F6 - by
themselves these could have created a nightmare for you. 8KNXP became sort
of stable with F6, but is stable / settled with F10. Bios versions F7, F8,
and F9 should not be used as they had major issues, and were
correspondingly short lived.

I suggest that if you can, read any notes on the gigabyte site re the bios
versions you have used and check these against the use you have of the
different controllers (RAID, IDE, non HDD devices) and the needed device
drivers & versions. There are new ITE drivers out (for quite a while) and
updates corresponding to these in one or other bios version.

- Tim

You would *think* the latest BIOS would be the best, sadly in the case of
the FI BIOS for the GA-8KNXP rev 2.1 the reverse is true.

Using FI the RAID 0 SATA Raptors took ages to boot from, yet FH works
perfect. I emailed Gigabyte and hopefully FJ will resolve it. But do we have
to wait another 5 months for a BIOS update??