Raptor 150 problem - begging for help

[chynn]

You might check google for raptor like you have and NF4 problems. I have heard of a few and I am not sure if there has been an answer. They have two versions of that new thing and the cheaper version is "for" servers by the firmware it has on it and the one with the clear top is aimed at home/gamer/enthusiast setups and may actually have a bearing on why you had trouble transferring files.

 

The drives are new and it would not surprise me at all to see an issue with them and some drivers until they sort it out. The they will likely be Nvidia if and when they get around to knowing there is a problem and then checking with WD. DFI nor any other mobo makers writes the drivers and if it is driver related > I doubt a quick cure.

 

And yes I am quite aware you are 'not now' in windows but you were when you started having troubles and windows will right the master boot record wrong if it thinks to do it at all and then you have two possible problems.

 

RGone...

 

FYI, I am running two of the 150G Raptors (plain black wrapper) in RAID 0 (SATA3, SATA1) and have experienced NO problems with the drives. These are my 3rd pair (37G, 74G, and now these); all run RAID 0.

 

However, having defended the Raptor reputation as the BEST hard drives made ... some things I have learned while perusing these forums.

 

1. You need to run the F6 floppy disc drivers even though you're not running RAID ... something about SATA150 vs SATA300 drive timings in the driver; not in the chipset.

 

2. Do not load any of the nVidia firewall stuff off the DFI CD-ROM disk.

 

3. Enable all four of the nVidia SATA ports in the BIOS, even though you're only using one or two ports.

 

4. Disconnect (or unplug) all drives (including SATA drives) except for the floppy, DVD/CD-ROM reader, and the drive XP is going on. Windows setup does wierd things when it finds more than one drive during its install.

 

I put a detailed post as to how to install Windows XP in a reply to another post like yours. Try to find it ... it might help you out.

 

Hope this helps ...

[Guest GripS]

Actually i never installed any drivers when installing windows on my single Raptor. I have to disagree there.

[wespaul]

chynn, some interesting thoughts there. I did not install any RAID drivers at the F6 prompt. I also installed NVidia firewall off the DFI disk. I may try your ideas soon.

 

All- Update on the saga:

 

You'll remember that I cleared CMOS before yesterday's plea for help, got the PC to boot on the old IDE drive, and went to bed. Well, last night I got back to it. I disconnected the IDE drives, plugged in the raptor, held my breath and booted the system. It came up!

 

I downloaded and ran the WD disk diagnostic (long version, took ~ 35 miniutes). No problems detected. Powered down, plugged in one IDE and rebooted. Before I go on, remember I had reformatted and reinstalled XP on the raptor with no IDE drives plugged in already, so it seems the CMOS clear solved the no-boot problem. OK, now the system comes up booting from the raptor with the IDE plugged in. It recognizes them both and starts up fine. Next step is to try to transfer the rest of my files to the raptor.

 

I went to the same folder I had been trying to transfer earlier, started the copy, and .........CRASH!........ down it went again. Sweating bullets, I let it reboot, which went fine. Don't report the frickin' error to MS! Back up seemingly stable, and I took a closer look at the folder I was transfering. Guess what it was crashing on? A backup file (backup.bkf)!

 

Avoiding that file, I decided to try to transfer everything else, and it worked just fine. Now, I don't know if I still have a problem lurking in the system waiting to bite me, but I did a few common tasks with the machine last night, and it appeared to be stable. At this point, it looks like it might be OK, but time and continued use will tell. My confidence in the stability of this build is still low, but I am impressed by the zing my system has with this raptor. I noticed that CMOS reloaded survived the ordeal, but I was too tired to mess with it when I saw it. Yeah, I should have remembered that the whole idea behind CMOS reloaded was just these situations.

 

Is this just common sense to the rest of you to avoid transfering a backup file from another drive? Common sense that wasn't so common in my case? Anyway, there you go. I'll post again if any new info/problems crop up. Thanks to all who gave me tips!

 

Wes

[RGone]

sahilmalik said:

I found that unregistering MS's stupid AVI preview dll (shmedia.dll; see http://www.tweakxp.com/tweak2123.aspx) (which tries to preview / read tech data for all avi files, regardless if they're 700MB +) fixed it. I suspect that since that stupid preview routine seems to run at higher priority than explorer's file copy, it was causing underruns or something as it tried to read into the file I just clicked (i.e. the one I was copying).

 

If you had the O/s set to show error and not reboot at error you likely would see an error message called "file error; path too deep" or wording to that effect. That error locks some rigs and reboots others. But I did google search for your .bkf file errror and then the problems began to show up.

 

.bkf is an ASR recovery file and has the entirety of the C: drive crushed into one file folder and the number of files per path is too long and the file cannot be transferred most of the time.

 

That one tip up there seems most likely from drive to internal drive. Oh yes tons of people actually found out they had a bad IDE cable.

 

RGone...