I have to admit, this one has me really puzzelled especially because I am a techie.

PC Spec,

Abit AT7 Max2 Mobo,

Athlon XP 2700 CPU,

1GB Ram, (2x512 matched pair),

Sony Dru700a dvd writer,

2 x 120GB ATA133 drives in Raid 0,

Geforce FX5900 Ultra graphics card.

Linksys 54G wireless lan card.

550W power supply

OS - Windows XP pro with SP2

This config has worked well for quiet some time now with no problems at all.

3 weeks ago I added an adaptec 39160 ultra160 scsi card and 2 x 18GB ultra 160 10k rpm drives. These drives have a faster performance than the 2 drive raid config above and I have been using them as a workspace and to hold the XP pageing file.

All has been fine till a couple of days ago when XP blue screened on power up, it did this several times and then on the 3rd go started successfully.

It has been doing this on every reboot/power cycle (3rd or 4th go) ever since, till today when it wouldnt restart at all. I tried all kinds of stuff and eventually I pulled the scsi card and presto, the pc booted 1st time. Haha I thought, so I tried a different scsi card and got the blue screen again. I disconnected one of the drives, same. Then swapped and tried the other, same result. I have updated the via mobo drivers, the graphics drivers, the scsi card drivers and so on.

What has got me, is that windows works and boots fine into safe mode with networking 1st time, everytime with everything connected and all drives can be accessed including the scsi ones.

Sometimes when switching the machine on I get the "verifying dmi pool data - update success" message even though no hardware has been changed.

Any more suggestions, could it be a power problem after all this time? The event log has some error 26's in it whatever they are

Do you have any more details of the bluescreen on power up?

Try the help room at the Pc advisor forum they may be able to help or at least throw you life line

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk they have always helped me but you may have to register though.

Is it possible to update the firmware on the SCSI card?

Rob.

Is it possible to update the firmware on the SCSI card?

Tried that, installed the latest one from the adaptec website. the drives are recognised by the scsi bus scan one is ID 0 and the other is ID 6. I am using an LVD scsi cable with terminator built in (the term light comes on), both drives are recognised as U160 and then windows tries to boot and crashes.

I have also tried the card in several PCI slots, and the drives on both scsi channels.

Right, just tried it with the card and no drives connected. Windows still works, so I shutdown again and put the power leads back in the drives and windows still works. The only thing not connected now is the scsi cable, so I am checking that.

Have you tried that latest motherboard bios?

You might have to run the "Repair" option on Windows setup to sort out the issue. Also have you installed any Windows Updates lately?

After much messing around, all seems to be working in the end.

I used safe mode and copied the files I wanted to keep to the raid 0 array.

I then low level formatted both scsi drives using the adaptec scsi bios disk tools, that in turn destroyed the XP disk signatures and volume information.

Then I rebooted to XP and it booted fine, so I recreated the volumes and disk signatures and everything is working once more.

So in the end it looks like something to do with the disk config and XP got corrupted and needed to be rebuilt.

i had a similair problem when i rebuilt my computer. blue screen came up, tried everything. when i rang the local computer shop for help they said that if i changed more than 4 pieces of hardware with windows xp this always happens. i reformatted my drive and everything was fine.

Tom.

Bill Gates says that XP can't blue screen, so it must've been your imagination, Manny!

Phil