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Old September 3rd 04, 12:11 PM
Steve E
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I've had a similar problem but from another angle. I was running a
A7N8X Deluxe board with a single SATA drive (couldn't afford to get
two at the time of purchase) and was using that as my only drive. I
never had to configure any raid set to get it working - just plugged
it in and gave windows the drivers during the install - no problem.

The problem I had is that after 12 months of use (don't things always
fail after the guarantee period!) Windows then started to blue screen
and moaned about NTFS.SYS and wouldn't boot. I tried bunging in an old
ATA drive, installing XP and then booting from that and try to use the
SATA drive as a slave but XP moaned about that too. In the end, I
resorted to just having the single SATA drive plugged in and then
booting from a KNOPPIX (Linux) bootable CD. KNOPPIX supports the
READING of NTFS but won't ever write to the disk so the risk of
corruption doesn't exist. KNOPPIX recognised the SATA disk without any
problems and mounted it. I could then browse the disk at my hearts
content. It's also got CD/DVD burning software so I just burnt the
entire HD to loads of DVD's - instant backup (which I should have done
ages ago).

I've now coughed-up and bought 2HDs (Seagate 120Gb) which I've used to
create a mirrored set. Haven't had any problems so far (touch wood).
Needless to say, I'm now looking quite hard at disk/partition
management and backup software. Partition Magic got ruled out quite
early on as it doesn't support RAID sets. Now looking at Ghost and
Drive Image 7.