Haaaalp... RAID drivers / USB meltdown?

frivolous_fay

Hi all... hope someone can kindly advise.

We hooked up a PC we're retiring to our TV in order to get some files off it. The annoying part was that the TV couldn't cope with the res it was set to - to get round this, we got rid of the GFX card drivers in order to use the basic graphics. Prior to this, I uninstalled some games and other apps.

On restarting... neither the USB keyboard or mouse would work. So no login. Safe mode: ditto. Have tried PS2 keyboard, and alternative USB mouse - nothing - can't get past login screen.

We know the keyboard works up to the login screen, because you can pick safe mode, etc. O/H thinks RAID drivers are kaput, but we're having a hard time pinning down the floppy to resolve this. Just tried using XP disc to restore - and it says the HD is not there - OH was not surprised by this; said it seemed to reinforce his RAID theory (way over my head)

We were hoping to do some kind of restore through DOS, but all suggestions seem to involve actually being able to log in.

Any ideas?

frivolous_fay

By the way, it's been reasonably well looked after... has SP3.

basmic

I would do a repair installation of XP.

Regarding the RAID, you will need the correct drivers to feed into XP setup. When setup loads, and comes with a bluescreen saying it's loading, I think it says something along the lines of "press F6 to install third-part drivers" - it is then you feed the floppy disk with the RAID drivers.

Little_John

I would have just booted in safemode, adjusted the resolution and rebooted problem solved, messing with drivers was not needed especially as it will normally reboot and find the drivers when it finds the hardware again.

Reset the bios to defaults or optimal defaults and see how that goes, also check for bent pins on the keyboard, mouse and ports your connecting to.

As for the raid use another pc to get the drivers and create a driver disk for the running of setup/repair

Psychofly

Do you actually use RAID or do you just have the drivers installed ? 95% of people have no use for RAID and it's an extra overhead and an extra thing to go wrong. Boot up in safe mode and see if you have control. If so then use Safe Mode with Network to copy the stuff off you want and reinstall the PC - I would advise without RAID.

frivolous_fay

Little_John wrote: »

I would have just booted in safemode, adjusted the resolution and rebooted problem solved, messing with drivers was not needed especially as it will normally reboot and find the drivers when it finds the hardware again.

Wasn't possible - in normal mode, it would get to the desktop, load up the few things we had running at startup, and then, ping! a black screen with a message saying the resolution wasn't supported... and the only option was rebooting. We tried getting into the display properties but there wasn't time to apply a lower one before that kicked in. Was very annoying. In safe mode, it didn't seem to matter what you set the display properties to - normal mode didn't retain them (we did try that)

More annoyances were that we couldn't find the floppy with the RAID stuff and the only other PC in the house with a floppy drive was out of action.. sigh! We finally got a floppy sorted but it seemed not to want to load the drivers.

Repair of XP kept failing at a certain point. Ultimately we had to install XP on top of the existing installation. More research into the problem ultimately revealed that people with the same problem invariably end up reformatting their machines :mad: There is apparently no sensible fix.

Thanks for the suggestions anyway!

mdbarber

most mainboards have an option in the bios to set the raid controller to diff modes, sounds like yours was set to raid, prob could have been done if you simply changed the raid mode to ide and used the xp disk to boot off, then run chkdsk /r from the command prompt.
of course this only applies if you werent actually using a raid array